I have often felt that the power and flexibility of a game engine like Unreal Engine can be very helpful if used in performances. I worked with Company E this week in Abu Dhabi at the Cultural Center for The Pearl Diver’s Daughter. I created most of the visual design but built scenes in Unreal and rendered them as video files. It is remarkable that, unlike video, if I want to change a scene or add elements, it is pretty easy to do, provided you understand Unreal. However, it is not hard to wrap your head around. I mostly used free assets to populate a level, alter it to my liking, I added lighting and post-processing effects, and rendered the scenes.
The challenge was how long it could take to render a scene and the occasional error where it would glitch, the camera would move, or a particle would only be seen part of the time. I did have a few late nights, but all in all, everything was finished on time.
