Tape Deck is a Time Machine

A coming-of-age adventure created using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, ‘Tape Deck is a Time Machine’ is a Real-Time animation film directed by Oscar-winning director Patrick Osborne, produced by Nexus Studio.

Viewers follow a time-jumping teen who is transported into moments of other people’s lives by songs played on an old tape deck, and explore a tale of friendship and love centred around soulmates born generations apart.

The world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool, Unreal Engine enables game developers and creators across industries to realise next-generation real-time 3D content and experiences with greater freedom, fidelity, and flexibility than ever before.

Osborne led a team of expert real-time artists and creators with the unusual challenge of creating a world with a refined 2D aesthetic, created entirely in the Unreal Engine with no compositing. The team developed bespoke shading techniques to achieve the painterly and naturalistic quality, leveraging the visual potential of the engine to make high quality stylised animation.

Nexus said that the use of Unreal opened a wide range of production advantages, among them the ability to render images nearly instantaneously while enabling multiple simultaneous inputs into any given scene.

Fonic working on the full audio post production and created original music as well as sourcing music.

You can watch the full trailer here.