The story
Dead Pixels started with a single page. Producer Matthew Mulot came to us with a one-pager from writer Jon Brown (Fresh Meat, Veep, Succession) and asked if we could make a teaser. It was a comedy about gamers, and our studio was small but full of gamers, so we said yes straight away. We loved the idea. About a year later, Matthew called again. The project had been picked up as a Channel 4 Blap, the channel's online strand for short comedy pilots, which has also launched shows such as Stath Lets Flats and We Are Lady Parts. Back then it was called Avatards. We created the artwork and animated around seven minutes of game footage for the pilot, and were invited to Channel 4 for the screening. A year after that came the green light. E4 commissioned a full series from Various Artists Limited, the production company founded by Phil Clarke with Peep Show creators Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong. Avatards became Dead Pixels. The show follows Meg, Nicky and Usman, three friends whose lives revolve around Kingdom Scrolls, a fantasy online role-playing game. Half of every episode happens inside the game. Series one aired on E4 in March 2019, directed by Al Campbell. It was well received and was reported as E4's biggest show since The Inbetweeners. Series two followed in January 2021.
What we did
We created Kingdom Scrolls: the world, the characters and all of the in-game animation, across both series. Series one was the first time we used our Unity pipeline for linear content. Rather than fake the look of a video game, we built a bespoke real-time pipeline in the Unity game engine and made broadcast animation the way a games studio would. We had 11 months to deliver more than an hour of CGI across six episodes, working closely with director Al Campbell and Jon Brown. The brief had a twist. In the story, Kingdom Scrolls is a neglected game from the early 2010s, so part of the joke was that it had to look a bit rough and dated. We had to make it look old on purpose and still hold up on broadcast. For series two, the story upgraded the game. A new expansion pack arrives and Kingdom Scrolls gets a glossy modern overhaul, so we rebuilt the whole game with updated, AAA-style visuals, again in Unity. We also created a version of Kingdom Scrolls as it would have looked in the year 2000. Series two ran on a nine-month schedule. Our core team never grew beyond 20 people. That small, gamer-heavy team delivered two series of game animation for E4, and when series two was announced, Various Artists' Phil Clarke called Keyframe "our exceptional animators".
Stills
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Credits
