“This Tape Deck Is a Time Machine” the new animated series from Nexus Studios

Today, Nexus Studios, the BAFTA-winning studio behind the animated horror comedy The House and the Grammy-nominated musical film Happier than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles with Billie Eilish, has released the trailer for their new animated production in development: This Tape Deck Is a Time Machine (This recorder is a time machine), from Oscar and Emmy winning director Patrick Osborne. The teaser shows a distinctive 2D graphic style created entirely with Unreal Engine technology.

Conceived and directed by Osborne and produced at Nexus Studios using the Unreal Engine, this training adventure follows a teenager who leaps through time and is transported into moments in other people's lives, by songs played on an old tape recorder. In his heart, This Tape Deck Is a Time Machine (This recorder is a time machine) is an impossible story of friendship and love centered on soulmates born generations apart. The cast is a diverse group of misfits, inspired by Patrick's gang of friends in his teens.

Osborne led a team of experienced Unreal Engine software artists and creators at Nexus Studios, who took on the unique challenge of creating the world of Tape Deck with a refined 2D aesthetic, created entirely in the Unreal Engine without any composition. The team developed bespoke shading techniques to achieve pictorial and naturalistic quality, leveraging the visual potential of the engine to create high-quality stylized animations.

“This is a project that opens up new horizons both from a creative and a technical point of view. It is an animated production with music at the center, told with a strong graphic sensibility, which pushes the animation to a new audience and at the same time innovates the way it is made ", said Chris O'Reilly, co-founder and executive creative director of Nexus Studios.

Taking advantage of Epic Games' Unreal Engine in this way offers a multitude of benefits, including the ability to render images almost instantly and enable multiple inputs in a scene simultaneously. This allows for greater creative freedom and iterative autonomy for filmmakers who will be able to manipulate animated scenes in a style similar to live footage.

As the recipient of an Epic MegaGrant, Nexus Studios was able to continue its long-standing partnership with Epic Games. By innovating and enhancing the existing capabilities of Unreal Engines' strengths, the real-time division of Nexus Studios was able to take an agile and more iterative approach to linear animated cinema at the highest quality.

Nexus Studios | Epic Mega Grants