Ghost Town

Greg Patten

I'm an animator and film director from New Jersey. I'm currently working on my senior thesis project, and aspire to create and tell stories that are both meaningful to me and to my audience.

I found a passion for storytelling ever since I was a child playing with Legos. I've followed that passion all the way to present day, creating animation and digital art, and hope to continue this journey well into the future.

About the Story

Ghost Town is a six-part animated series about two brothers, Tom and George, surviving as best they can in a post-apocalyptic world. Along the way, they’ll encounter friends, foes, and everything in between, both living and dead.

With experience creating animated shorts, I wanted to create my most ambitious and personal story yet. Ghost Town is an exploration into the zombie genre, with all its symbolism and subtle depth, as well as an exercise in catharsis, blending elements of my own life into a story that is both meaningful to me as its creator, and (hopefully) entertaining to audiences young and old.

My Process

Unreal Engine and Real-Time Renders

What makes Ghost Town especially unique is the employment of Epic’s Unreal Engine (showcased above) throughout production.

Thanks to Unreal Engine’s real-time rendering and robust filmmaking features, I was able to visualize each scene from the very beginning in pre-production, quickly implement changes and experiment without rendering bottlenecks, and utilize a production-quality pipeline as a lone filmmaker contending with the limitations of COVID-19. In short, Unreal Engine is making the impossible possible, and it was my goal to make the most out of my time with it.

Synty Studios Assets and Mixamo Animations

A big part of this thesis, as well as my past projects, is an emphasis on the filmmaking craft as a whole, rather than the sum of its parts. What matters most to me is how well I’ve told the story, and I’ve been lucky enough to have been able to bring together top-tier models from Synty Studios, as well as pre-made motion capture animations from Mixamo, and music/SFX from Epidemic Sound.

This allowed me to focus my time and energy on the project itself, and gave me the ability to deliver my original vision for this story without needing to focus on the more technical aspects of animation production.