Space Dan follows a billionaire who builds a private space station for his birthday. When the party goes wrong, the characters are brought back to simpler, more human gestures. We made the film as a team of five over ten months, with fourteen characters on screen.

We chose Unreal Engine and learned much of the workflow as we went. Neither Blender nor Unreal was taught at our school, and the existing production pipeline did not fit our tools.

Visually, we wanted to keep something of the 3D viewport in the finished film. The characters are blocky, with visible construction lines and no mouths or eyebrows. These choices reduced the complexity of the rigs, but also made it harder to create empathy. Movement, framing, music and staging had to carry the emotion.

As co-director, I worked on character design, clothing in Marvelous Designer and compositing, and coordinated with external collaborators. I also set up Kitsu on a repurposed computer for production tracking, with remote access through Tailscale. We later introduced Gitea with the school for version control.

Clothing was a particular challenge. Simulating it outside Unreal would have meant exporting and reimporting every time a shot changed. We tested uDraper, then approached triMirror with the project and secured five extended licences for seven months. This let us simulate clothing in the engine while keeping the layout flexible.

To handle the amount of animation, I set up a Move.ai capture workflow using an iPhone and a high-contrast suit. For zero-gravity movements, I sat on a low table with my feet hanging in the air. Our Unreal setup could combine animation from Move.ai, Blender and Mixamo. We also kept most visual effects inside the engine, using Niagara and animated textures.

The aim throughout was to spend less time moving between tools and more time working on the film.