As an Official Partner of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, Unity is proud to celebrate the bold creators who are redefining storytelling via real-time filmmaking, VR/AR experiences, 360 video and more. This year, 70% of the interactive experiences in the New Frontier exhibit were Made with Unity.

As creators around the world reimagine storytelling in real-time, many of them are tapping Asset Store tools and packages for creating wide-ranging cinematic and interactive experiences. In this post we’ve spotlighted a project showcasing at New Frontier and several other recent examples outside Sundance to inspire your own creativity.

Fueling creativity at Sundance Film Festival

Chorus, an empowering social VR experience

From the award-winning VR visionary, Tyler Hurd, comes his newest project, Chorus, a social VR experience showcasing at New Frontier. With several groundbreaking VR projects under his belt, such as Old Friend (Tribeca Film Festival 2016) and Chocolate VR (Sundance Film Festival New Frontier Selection 2017), Tyler has leveraged Unity once again to produce his next VR project. Set to “Chorus” by Justice, to battle evil in this epic journey of empowerment.

To achieve Chorus’s gorgeous visuals, Tyler and his team leaned on Asset Store plugins like Shader Forge, Hx Volumetric Lighting, and the Post-Processing Stack.

Learn more about Chorus here and see all of the amazing Unity experiences being showcased at the Sundance Film Festival.

Empowering storytellers across the globe

Sonder forges a new path for real-time animation

Directed by Pixar alum Neth Nom and produced by feature-film veteran Sara Sampson, Sonder is an upcoming animated short film created with Unity. The story revolves around Finn, a young man struggling to overcome a recent breakup. With a team located across 14 time zones, Sonder is a passion project that was two years in the making.

The team crossed into uncharted territory by developing a unique production pipeline that combines the skills of their storytellers, artists and animators, plus the benefits of real-time rendering. They’ve also leveraged Unity’s Post-Processing Stack to polish their film, and created their own Shaders tool – available on the Asset Store (Toony Colors Pro 2) – to achieve Sonder’s unique stylized look.

Learn more about the team and Sonder here.

Neon opens the door to rapid cinematic prototyping

Developed by Veselin Efremov, the director of the real-time short film ADAM, Neon is a compelling, futuristic scene. Using a variety of models from the Asset Store, the powerful camera capabilities of Cinemachine, and industry-leading post-FX from the Post-Processing Stack, Efremov composed a stunning cinematic scene in a matter of days.

Neon shows that real-time tools in Unity, plus easy access to a wealth of Asset Store resources, opens up a new world of creativity for filmmakers, where they can quickly prototype their ideas and experiment without having to go through time-intensive waterfall steps like sketching, storyboarding, and modeling.

Get a behind-the-scenes look at how Neon was created.

Out-of-the-box creativity with Mr. Carton

With over a decade of experience as a graphic artist in the video game industry, Michaël Bolufer jumped into real-time cinematic production with Mr. Carton, a 13-episode children’s program created with Unity. Mr. Carton, the world’s first real-time cartoon series, debuted in February 2017 on France’s national television website.

The team grabbed several popular packages from the Asset Store to build the foundation for their production pipeline. For example, they used Flux, a cinematic editor, to create sequences in each episode directly in the Unity Editor, and they tapped Quickbrush for fine-tuning and “painting” objects directly in-scene.

Learn how Mr. Carton was produced here.

A daring mouse stars in Ghost of a Tale

As a supervising animator at Dreamworks and Universal Studios, Lionel Gallat worked on films such as Despicable Me (2010) and The Lorax (2012). For his very own Ghost of a Tale, his prowess as an animator and game designer come together beautifully. This Redwall-inspired game shows off a variety of breathtaking environments and takes advantage of tools on the Asset Store to bring characters and their world to life.

Within the game, animals’ ears flop, tails wag, and the jacket of the protagonist Tilo jounces realistically during his adventures. Gallat employed IK rigging (courtesy of Final IK from the Asset Store) to make his memorable characters look truly connected and at home in their magical world.

Every nook and cranny of Tilo’s environment has a highly detailed and natural feel to it, thanks in part to tessellation shaders created with Amplify Shader.

Learn more about how Ghost of a Tale was created.

Find the tools and assets that make these experiences possible on the Asset Store.