Passengers Movie uses Cinema Director

Passengers Movie

When we think of Unity, many of us tend to think about making games first. However, as we know, Unity can be used to create all sorts of interactive experiences for media, businesses and entertainment. Such is true with the hit Passengers movie that was released in December.

Passengers is a sci-fi movie where “The starship Avalon is transporting over 5,000 colonists to the planet Homestead II, a journey that takes 120 years. The colonists and the entire crew are in hibernation pods, but as the ship passes through a large asteroid field, the ship’s shield is heavily strained causing a malfunction that awakens one passenger, mechanical engineer Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), 90 years early.” -Wikipedia

Passengers used Unity, as well as Cinema Director and other Unity Asset Store plugins to create some subtle, yet very important visual effects components of the movie.

User Interface in Passengers Movie (Courtesy of Sony Pictures)

Cinema Director and Sequencing UI

Vincent Parker is a Playback Graphics and Software Engineer, who developed all of the user interface elements for Passengers. He required a set of tools that would allow him to sequence the events happening on the user interface displays on the movie, and match them to the action of the actors in the film. To do this, he chose Cinema Director, as well as other assets available on the Unity Asset Store.

Cinema Director User Interface Sequencing for Passengers Movie (Courtesy of Vincent Parker)

“One of the deciding factors for my choice to move to Unity for feature film playback work was the seemingly endless amounts of plugins available in the Unity Asset store. Anytime I have a technical challenge on set, 9 times out of 10 I can find a tool on the asset store to solve it.” says Vincent. “I used Unity and Cinema Director to do interface graphics and animation on set for the film”.

We are looking forward to featuring a full interview with Vincent, where he will talk in-depth about the features of Cinema Director and how he worked with it for the film. In the meantime, check out Vincent’s blog for more information on how he used Unity, Cinema Director, Sprite Factory and Text Mesh Pro to help bring his vision come life!