Academy Award®-winning animated short War Is Over! makes Unreal Engine history
November 1, 2024
Academy Award®-winning animated short War Is Over! makes Unreal Engine history
At the 96th Academy Awards, anti-war animated short film War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko made history as the first project made in Unreal Engine 5 to win the Academy Award® for Best Animated Short Film.
The film follows a carrier pigeon as it delivers messages between two World War I front line soldiers playing a chess game, unaware they are fighting on opposite sides. Inspired by pro-peace holiday song “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” released by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971, the heavily stylized 11-minute film was directed by Dave Mullins and produced by Brad Booker with Yoko Ono Lennon and Sean Ono Lennon serving as executive producers.
More than five decades later, the pacifist message of “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” remains important. As Sean Ono Lennon explored ways to extend the song’s longstanding cultural relevance, he connected with Mullins, a veteran Pixar animator who established real-time animation studio ElectroLeague with Booker in 2020. Favoring a narrative approach, the collaborators quickly outlined a story that embodied and expanded upon the song’s core theme in a way that would resonate with modern audiences. After the working script was shared with iconic filmmaker Peter Jackson, he involved the Wētā FX Special Projects team, which had been experimenting with animation in Unreal Engine dating back to their “Meerkat” short in 2020.
Along with telling an impactful story, the short provided a compelling opportunity for Wētā FX to unlock new creative methods and explore more flexible workflows. Their goal with this project was to showcase how Unreal Engine could be used to produce high-quality animation and empower artists with a greater sense of ownership over scenes and the ability to iterate frequently and rapidly during the creative process.
“The main benefit of using Unreal versus a traditional animation workflow is the responsiveness,” said Keith Miller, VFX Supervisor at Wētā FX. “There’s an immediacy to the work, where things are pretty much near instantaneous and that allows for a level of iteration that you don’t typically see on a project.”
After the script was finalized in late 2021, production kicked off in February 2022 and wrapped in July 2023. Though the project creation spanned a year and a half, the bulk of the rendering was completed in the last six months.
Ultimately, the short marked the biggest undertaking for the Wētā FX Special Projects team to date, comprising 214 shots and featuring 222 assets, including seven hero characters, 124 set dressings, 57 props, 38 environments, 19 trees, 16 weapons, nine layouts, six vehicles, and one feathered animal.
“The main benefit of using Unreal versus a traditional animation workflow is the responsiveness,” said Keith Miller, VFX Supervisor at Wētā FX. “There’s an immediacy to the work, where things are pretty much near instantaneous and that allows for a level of iteration that you don’t typically see on a project.”
After the script was finalized in late 2021, production kicked off in February 2022 and wrapped in July 2023. Though the project creation spanned a year and a half, the bulk of the rendering was completed in the last six months.
Ultimately, the short marked the biggest undertaking for the Wētā FX Special Projects team to date, comprising 214 shots and featuring 222 assets, including seven hero characters, 124 set dressings, 57 props, 38 environments, 19 trees, 16 weapons, nine layouts, six vehicles, and one feathered animal.
Developing the look
In crafting the film’s unique aesthetic, Mullins was inspired by Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leyendecker. He enlisted production designer Zac Retz to help realize his vision for the project’s visual style and Max Narciso for character design. Wētā FX then translated Narciso’s character designs and Retz’s production paintings into 3D for their production pipeline in a way that made sense spatially and preserved the right artistic details.
As a studio, Wētā FX is known for creating photorealistic visual effects and animation; in contrast, War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko required the team to break Retz’s stylized paintings into core pieces, then reassemble them to be suitable for filmmaking. By using Unreal Engine, artists were able to carry through the brushstroke qualities of the concept paintings by layering geometry and tying lighting into shading. While 3D content tends to line up perfectly, they used intentionally misaligned perspectives and skewed objects to convey an impressionistic art style. Like traditional painting done in layers, artists followed a similar approach in CG, playing with various colors, textures, and transparency levels.
In post, colorist David Cole (The Batman, Dune) provided the final polish to help guide the audience’s attention through the film.
As a studio, Wētā FX is known for creating photorealistic visual effects and animation; in contrast, War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko required the team to break Retz’s stylized paintings into core pieces, then reassemble them to be suitable for filmmaking. By using Unreal Engine, artists were able to carry through the brushstroke qualities of the concept paintings by layering geometry and tying lighting into shading. While 3D content tends to line up perfectly, they used intentionally misaligned perspectives and skewed objects to convey an impressionistic art style. Like traditional painting done in layers, artists followed a similar approach in CG, playing with various colors, textures, and transparency levels.
In post, colorist David Cole (The Batman, Dune) provided the final polish to help guide the audience’s attention through the film.
UE in action
The filmmakers opted to shoot performance capture to provide the framework for the film’s action, leveraging Unreal Engine for some scenes. Once the skeletal and object tracking data was imported into Unreal Engine and layered with corresponding CG elements, filmmakers could find and adjust camera angles using the full context of the scenes and lighting in engine.
The team used a Blueprint-based actor system to store metadata, and track assets and dependencies. Layout was managed using a variety of tools in conjunction with Unreal Engine, including Wētā FX’s proprietary Olympus pipeline, Maya and MotionBuilder. Artists were often working in parallel on shots, addressing different elements like animation, lighting or skeletal meshes separately and simultaneously.
The team used a Blueprint-based actor system to store metadata, and track assets and dependencies. Layout was managed using a variety of tools in conjunction with Unreal Engine, including Wētā FX’s proprietary Olympus pipeline, Maya and MotionBuilder. Artists were often working in parallel on shots, addressing different elements like animation, lighting or skeletal meshes separately and simultaneously.
By structuring the project into different scopes—Movie, Environment, Scenario and Shot—the Wētā FX team was able to provide artists with enhanced visibility while preserving tool performance and responsiveness. Artists could work on aspects of the film at a higher level to enable efficiencies across groupings of shots before drilling down into details, which was more compute intensive. Working in Unreal Engine was particularly beneficial for lighting artists, who were able to iterate more fluidly; it also enabled the Wētā FX Special Projects team to present the film’s painterly aesthetic to ElectroLeague early on, then continually refine.
War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko features music by Thomas Newman and was created as a co-production of Lenono Music, ElectroLeague, Wētā FX, and Epic Games. Check out the War Is Over! trailer here!
War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko features music by Thomas Newman and was created as a co-production of Lenono Music, ElectroLeague, Wētā FX, and Epic Games. Check out the War Is Over! trailer here!