When the six-member crew of the Serrano wrecks their ship; Kent, C-LA, Ada, Eloy, Mod and Nexus must race against time and some mysterious planet inhabitants to escape before they become the main course.

Steamroller Animation is an independent studio that has thrived in a competitive industry for more than a decade. They’ve built a successful business providing high-quality animation services for other companies, but they don’t have a lot of money for their own original content. They’re trying to change that, and have produced this amazing—did I say amazing?—animated pilot for what we hope like mad will be a new series on Netflix.

If you go to their web site, you can see not only samples of the animation, but some of how they do what they do. I’m as sure of it as I’m sure I’m breathing that Blender is also part of their pipeline.

Netflix, if you scan the internet for this stuff, you need to see this.

One of the most expensive and time consuming aspects of creating any animated content is the render phase, where it can take up to an hour and a half to render each individual frame. If you’re Dreamworks, or Pixar, or Disney, this is built into your budget. Unreal Engine, however, allows for new kinds of production pipelines that sidestep all this, allowing the creation of fully rendered scenes on single workstations instead of requiring what’s called a “render farm” to push out 300 frames for every ten seconds of usable footage. You’d think that a lot of studios would be using Unreal Engine to produce commercial, finished work, but the number of them that are remains astonishingly small.

Over the past 3.5 years, Steamroller has invested their profits into developing this technological framework that will support a future range of incredible stories. Spice Frontier is their industry calling card, and they’re looking for investment, co-production partners, broadcasters, and distributors to bring future episodes to life.

Again, Netflix, if you’re reading this, go write them a big check.

Here also is the short film they produced that was the jumping off point for their pilot episode. This short subject has won a number of festival prizes, including best animated film at Dragon Con Independent Short Film Festival in 2019.

Get in touch with them at: Contact@SteamrollerStudios.com

Since the assets are all Unreal Engine compatible, you can also play their Fortnite Island Spice Frontier: Cosmic Rush 5992-1806-0944

Cast:
Kentucky Williams – Zach Cipriano
C-LA – Madison Lee
Ada – Kiera Please
Eloy – Bruce P. Barker
Mod – Emily Stockdale