At some point in the future, prisoners are uploaded into the bodies of robots. That’s the story of Adam, a cool short film from Unity Technologies which was designed to show off their gaming engine's animation chops.

Adam opens with one robot (presumably the title character), as it and its fellow prisoners are released en masse from the prison that had them locked up. They’re greeted by a mysterious pair who erases their felony record, and leads them off... somewhere.

Admittedly, there's not much story here — it's just an animation demo, but what we get is utterly gorgeous. The team did a good job conveying Adam's panic and bewilderment in just a couple of minutes, while the lighting and colors are just fantastic. The film was assembled with a beta version of Unity 5.4, along with a forthcoming cinematic sequencer tool.

What’s really interesting is that it seems as though the company will be making these tools "freely available" in the near future. This could be a really great thing — not just for gamer creators — but also conceivably for short filmmakers who want to create some fantastic visuals for their own science fiction story.

With filmmakers such as Neill Blomkamp (Elysium) and Duncan Jones (Moon, Warcraft) making the jump from short films and commercials to feature-length productions, having these sorts of tools available for aspiring filmmakers makes the future for science fiction film a very exciting prospect. We could see the starts of some exciting careers in the next couple of years.