Pixar veteran Mark Andrews explains how Unreal Engine will pave the way to the "era of independent animated film"

Unreal Engine is a pretty common name in the world of video games as it's the tool that many of the latest and greatest games have been built upon. But it's also a much more versatile piece of software that can be used in other mediums, such as film animation.

To this end, as part of our coverage of San Diego Comic Con Malaga, we caught up with Pixar veteran and animation expert Mark Andrews, to pick his brain about how Unreal Engine is changing the landscape of film production.

"Unreal Engine is such a fantastic tool because it's just a renderer that renders in real time," begins Andrews. "I don't have to spend a week waiting for my shot to render. What that allows us to do, in coordination with using mocap, is I don't need the big, cumbersome, gigantic crews that it takes to do an animated film, where you really have to plan because it's so expensive and you're going to get everybody involved. As it goes down, these productions are tried-and-true 30-year-old production styles. Now we don't have to adhere to them anymore. We can have smaller crews working faster. Unreal helps make that happen."

He then goes on to express that Unreal Engine allows creators to more quickly adjust their projects and adapt on the fly in a manner that is somewhat similar to live-action production.

"All the projects I'm working on right now, the problem with animation is that to get any kind of organicness into something that's very mechanical and computery is incredibly hard. We have to plan that. But being on a mocap stage with a virtual camera, now I can work with the actors. I can explore the scene. I can workshop the moment. If it's not working, I know it's not working right there and I can rewrite on the stage. There's much more of this improvisational, organic, back-and-forth creativity."

"And we can find stuff and you can record all of it, so you're keeping everything. And then when I go back in, now I can shoot it, or my layout team can go in and shoot it, and now they can shoot coverage. You don't have coverage in animation. And so the story now, we have this process, this pipeline now, that lets us act more like live-action. So you get the best of live-action in that organicness and finding stuff in the serendipity, the happy accidents, plus the total control of your visual image from animation, colliding in the best possible way."

Andrews has been using Unreal Engine to create his latest directorial works, a series known as Super Giant Robot Brothers. He reveals that the software helped to keep production costs far lower than traditional animation and that it should help usher in a new era for independent animated film creation.

"The Supergiant Robot Brothers was able to get made and we used Unreal to do it. It was a miracle. All the planets were aligned and we were laser-focused. So we did five hours of content in 18 months for $13 million. So when I came out of that experience, I'm going, wait a minute, if you gave me $13 million and I only had 90 minutes, I can do that in 18 months and all that extra money will go to the look of the film. So that's when it dawned on me, the era of the independent animated film is here, using these real-time pipelines."

Check out the full interview with Andrews below for more on his time working on Brave and Merida's crazy hair and even The Incredibles.