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After 27 years in games, comics and books, Rebellion plots its boldest development yet
After 27 years making games, comics and books, Rebellion plots ots its boldest development to date
We’ve been on a few studio tours in our time, but we have never seen anything quite like this. Rebellion’s new digs are spread across multiple cavernous buildings, a former printing press spanning 220,000 square feet, sat on a 12.5 acre plot. A walking tour takes half an hour and, we’re assured, barely scratches the surface. When Rebellion CEO and co-founder Jason Kingsley visited it for the third time, he went off on his own, poking around. “I was like a child going to a new house,” he tells us, “charging around like a lunatic, looking for dens and stuff like that. It was filthy, but it was absolutely brilliant. It felt like I was urban exploring – except we own it.”
Kingsley describes Rebellion, which he co-founded in Oxford in 1992 with his brother Chris, as a sort of “accidental company”. Still privately owned, it has been run, and has prospered, for almost 30 years on a sort of ad-hoc basis. There is always a plan, of course, but the brothers rarely think more than three or four years into the future, and many of the most critical decisions they have made have been about what felt right at the time. The latest of those choices might be the biggest yet, and this sprawling studio-to-be is the proof of it. Rebellion is going to the movies.
REBELLION IS ACTUALLY A FILM COMPANY ALREADY, AND HAS BEEN FOR SOME TIME
This might, on first inspection, sound like a special sort of madness. But there is logic to it, just as there has always been sound reasoning behind Rebellion’s more leftfield business decisions. Most significant is the fact that Rebellion is actually a film company already, and has been for some time. In 2003 it acquired Audiomotion, a VFX and motion-capture firm set up in the mid-1990s by a group of UK game developers. The operation grew, but its funding collapsed, its headcount of 40-odd people reduced suddenly to just seven. Rebellion swooped in, acquiring the company but keeping it at arm’s length; it would use Audiomotion for its games if it needed its services, and Audiomotion would bill Rebellion like any other client. But it was run as a standalone business, and as such could continue to work with external companies.
It really has. Game developers came from all over the world to use the company’s facilities – a series of stages in Wheatley, just outside Oxford, that seems plenty big enough until we’re shown around the new studio later on. Early on, the game industry was its primary source of business, but over time Audiomotion’s services have become of progressively greater interest to Hollywood. The company’s first bigname movie project came in 1999, when Audiomotion produced the Colosseum scenes for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. Since then it has added to its showreel the likes of World War Z,
Ready Player One and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and many more besides.
“The big thing for us is how the game industry and film industry are sort of coming together,” says Brian Mitchell, until recently the managing director of Audiomotion (he’s now head of the newly minted Rebellion Film Studios). He recalls how, when Audiomotion was helping Jager Developments shoot cutscenes for 2012 shooter
Spec Ops: The Line, the director was able to walk a shoulder-mounted camera around a virtual world, lining up his cutscene shot in realtime. That’s manna from heaven for a lot of today’s movie makers. “Virtual production, virtual cameras – we’ve been doing that sort of thing for a long time,” Mitchell says. “It’s the world we live in.
A lot of the software and techniques are now compatible, and all the problems – latency and other things that went against it – all those things have been solved now. It’s much more productionready, which is obviously far more film-friendly.”
Games are still a big part of Audiomotion’s business: its recent projects include cutscenes for
Forza Horizon 4, the ambitious live-action crowd in Guitar Hero Live, and over 120 hours of cinematics, action and performance capture for
Horizon Zero Dawn. But while in the early days games made up around 90 per cent of Audiomotion’s work, these days it’s a more even split with film – fluctuating from month to month, of course, but Hollywood’s impact on Audiomotion’s business has been significant. Suddenly Kingsley’s belief that a videogame company can start making films doesn’t seem quite so outlandish. He’s already seen it happen.
The stars are further aligning through 2000 AD, the sci-fi comic book which has been running since 1977 and which Rebellion acquired in, appropriately enough, the year 2000. It licensed 2000 AD’s most famous face, Judge Dredd, to DNA Films for the 2012 3D movie Dredd, which Kingsley says was “very well received. And we thought, you know what? It’s kind of a fun space, film and TV. But at the same time, if you give your toys to somebody else to play with… well, they’re playing with them. And yeah, they pay you money, which is great. But you don’t get to play with them in the same way.”
Hence the newly formed Rebellion Film Studios, through which Kingsley and co will get to play with their own toys, and are building a quite cavernous playroom to house them all. First on deck is a movie based on Rogue Trooper, to be directed by Duncan Jones (Moon, Warcraft),
and a TV series, Judge Dredd: Mega-City One. But the Didcot studio isn’t solely being built for Rebellion’s own work; it will also be available for hire by the wider film industry, where demand for studio space has never been higher. “There’s a huge explosion in production happening in the UK at the moment, because of the SVODs – the Netflixes, Amazons and Apples of this world,” Kingsley says. “They’re great, and are providing tonnes of really high-quality material, but the physical infrastructure isn’t there.”
When the Kingsleys were first contemplating getting into the film-making business, they started searching for suitable locations for shoots. None were exactly on their doorstep. “We were going to have to go to some far-flung parts of the world, and I just thought, ‘That’s not fun’,” Kingsley tells us. “I’ve got horses. I’ve got a company to run. One of the reasons I get up on a Monday morning is because I enjoy doing business, and the business of creativity. And I wanted to get involved – materially, very seriously involved – in the film and TV stuff we do. But if it was in South Africa? It’s a wonderful country, but it’s a long, long flight, and it’s a big commitment of time. Chris and I, in typical Rebellion fashion, said, ‘Right. This is a problem. How do we solve it?’ So we looked around, and found this massive printworks.”
A former newspaper printing press is, it turns out, an excellent location for a film studio. For a start, it’s brilliantly soundproofed – necessary before to keep industrial noise in, and now essential to keep the outside world at bay (just as well, since the facility is 100 yards away from a busy railway line). There are three electrical substations on site, with power for each reserved on the national grid, meaning the new studio can comfortably accommodate even the loftiest of shoot requirements. Perhaps best of all, it’s an absolute rabbit warren, a labyrinthine series of rooms of all shapes and sizes – as Kingsley puts it, “a studio and the location in equal measure.” On our tour we see plenty of what we’d think of as sound stages: big square rooms with four walls and a roof. But we also see much more, with Mitchell pointing out that one corridor, flanked by sloping glass walls overlooking what was once the main printing press, is a set-dressing away from being a supervillain’s lair. Elsewhere, an
open floor looks like the perfect venue for a shootout in a multistorey car park (Mitchell sees it as housing production admin, however). Down in the facility’s depths is a tracked recess, running right down the middle of the room, that used to be used for transporting materials and finished newspapers; Mitchell has already spoken to a nearby railway museum about borrowing some old track. If a shoot needs a subway station, there’s one right there on site.
Mitchell is a way off satisfied, however, constantly pointing out walls he wants knocked down or moved, at one point even indicating a roof he wants to raise. He’d like to level one of the big sheds around the back of the main building and start again. Audiomotion doesn’t only operate in its own studio: it goes out on location
too, and as such Mitchell knows how the likes of Pinewood, Leavesden and Elstree work – and, indeed, how they don’t. Rebellion is thinking hard about not only the structure of the Didcot studio, but its layout; how it needs to be arranged to ensure it can be used efficiently. Pinewood, the UK’s most famous studio, first opened in the 1930s. Its architects naturally did not consider how a 2019-sized production would turn up for work en masse. Mitchell is thinking about how security will deal with new arrivals, about