The Whale Singer journey started for me in February 2023. Back then Telescope was ramping up, no hardware was present, no location to produce in. We started with story board in May 2023. All infrastructure needed to be ordered. Storage, Servers, Backup, Workstations, Screens….

Still the biggest unknown was probably Unreal Engine. A full feature film with roughly 1200 shots, was nothing close to the 60-180 second commercials I had worked on before. To be fair in the end it was around 880 shots that were produced in unreal engine and not 1200. Water and character interaction was just too much to make work on a tight budget, so the fantastic Coproducer PFX made the call to produce their portion traditionally.

We wrote a pipeline from scratch, Giant Milk had started roughly 5 months before I had joined. The basic construct around Perforce and ftrack is now production proven. Christian Schnellhammer came up with a system to sparse checkout the data needed for a sequence. We had all linked in ftrack and could create a dependency graph for each sequence and thus only checkout the data that was really required. The workstations had 4 TB of data only storage. We regularly had to prune data that was already finished to get through. But in the end this even worked very well with Deadline on our little Renderfarm. (2x A6000 first gen, 10x RTX4090, but those were also the Artist Worstations… so we never had the full capacity)

There is so much little subprojects in the this body of work… I plan to break this up into seperate posts.

I spent roughly 2,5 years on the project.

The theatrical release in Germany is the 12th of February 2026.