‘Max Beyond’ Creator Hasraf Dulull Tests The Limits Of The Multi-Verse

With animation projects reaching greater creative heights than ever before, creators are now thinking outside the box in an attempt to continuously push the boundaries. For Hasraf ‘HaZ’ Dulull, creator of the new animated film Max Beyond, not only is he thinking outside the box, but he’s attempting to reinvent the box altogether. 

Max Beyond is a sci-fi thriller that tells the story of Leon, a marine who will stop at nothing to save his younger brother Max from the clutches of a ruthless corporation that is hellbent on cashing in on Max’s unique gift. As Max undergoes a constant barrage of medical experimentations in search of unlocking the key to his ability to open a portal into multiple dimensions, Leon discovers the truth about himself as he battles wave after wave of enemies. 

Max Beyond was created using Unreal’s game engine, putting itself in brand new territory for feature-length films. Alongside the film, Dulull’s company HaZimation is currently developing a video game that will put players in control of characters from Max Beyond. Dulull sat down with us to discuss the development process, his inspirations for creating the film, and how he’s looking to take his project well beyond the cinematic world. 

Matthew Swigonski: Can we talk about how quickly Max Beyond starts? You just head straight out of the gate, guns blazing. Literally. Was that your intention to make it feel like a video game? 

Hasraf Dulull: I’m a big fan of Michael Bay’s films. I love Michael Bay. I like the way he films and edits and the way that he just goes straight into it. For me, because it’s a very small budget, we didn’t really have time to create these big moments and that will allow the audience to focus on specific things. So for us, it’s all about pacing. We had to be fast, had to be quick, and kind of just reflect what the characters are going through.

Because we’ve got a character jump from one multi-verse to another. I’m a fan of the sci-fi action genre. I grew up watching Steven Spielberg films or watching those 90s movies where they’re edited in a way where you don’t have time to drag on, dude. I wanted to kind of give a homage back to those 90s movies.

Matthew Swigonski: You mentioned directors like Spielberg and Bay, do you have any other inspirations that guided you? 

Hasraf Dulull: When we were developing the project and we were trying to get actors on board or even executives on board, my pitch would always be something like The Raid meets Akira, with a twist of Edge Of Tomorrow. That has always been my pitch. Everyone’s like ‘Oh tell me more.’

Akira is a big, big influence for me. It was the first anime that I saw on VHS and I’m like ‘What is that?’ Not just visually and all the violence and all that. It had more to do with the nuanced layers of the complex stories and I was like ‘You can tell that in animation?’ That always stuck with me and everything Ghost In The Shell and other shows just kind of stuck with me.

Matthew Swigonski: I was honestly a little surprised by how violent Max Beyond is. I wasn’t really expecting that sort of brutality in the film because it has this shiny exterior to it. But then all of a sudden…

Hasraf Dulull: Dude, it was actually way more violent than what you saw. For me, I was like ‘If I’m gonna make an anime film, I’m gonna go Rated R with it.’ So there’s a lot of blood and gore. I thought that in the world of animation, you can push that. But when we did screen testing…people were like ‘It’s a bit violent, isn’t it?’ 

I think the minute you have like an eight or 10-year-old kid and the blood splats on their face. I managed to keep that in by the way, but there were some other shots [that were removed]. There’s a big knife fight scene and originally we had Leon just stabbing him in the ear several times and slicing and I did have fun with the motion capture clearly [laughs]. When they watched it, they were like ‘Do you really need to stab a guy in the ear eight times? We get it, he’s pissed. We get it, he’ll do whatever it takes to save his brother, but eight times in the ear? I mean c’mon!’ So I said ‘okay’ and we kind of cut that off. 

Matthew Swigonski: So did they try to negotiate down? Like let’s do just six stabs or five stabs, four stabs…

Hasraf Dulull: I end up doing it like one stab and then the camera moves and we hear all the stabbing in the background. I think it is actually more violent, what we don’t see it. The thing about the animation world is that anything goes, you know? If this was a live-action movie you have your limits. This is essentially my first animated feature. My background is in live-action, so I kind of shot it like a live-action. With animation, the pro is that you can do whatever you want. The con is sometimes you can go too far. 

Matthew Swigonski: As you mentioned, your background was in live-action. Did you find it more challenging working in animation?

Hasraf Dulull: Before I worked on live-action, I worked on visual effects for years. In VFX, I worked on movies like Hellboy and Harry Potter. And also I cut my teeth in filmmaking by doing Pre-Vis (previsualization) on a movie called The Dark Knight. So, I pretty much learned everything about cameras and pacing. It was essentially my film school. But before visual effects, like back in 1998 and 1999, I worked on PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 titles doing video game cinematics. 

Max Beyond is the combination of my video game experience and my live action, which is perfect because we’re using the Unreal engine. It is the game engine that a lot of games are being made with, like Fortnite. The fact that I’m able to do all of that in a real-time environment is a bit of a groundbreaking thing because animation as a medium is very, very expensive. 

It was massive because we had a lot of creative freedom. We didn’t have to wait for things to render. You don’t need teams of people that have all these processes in place. We just built the environment, built our characters, put them in there, put on the motion capture suit, did some mocap, and boom we’re in.

Matthew Swigonski: Was using Unreal Engine always the plan or did you ever experiment with different engines? 

Hasraf Dulull: I said I came from Pre-Vis, right? So I was already using Unreal to do Pre-Vis, but the thing is that I remember doing Pre-Vis on The Dark Knight and everything was greyscale and very blocky because Pre-Vis is just to get the point across. But when I was doing Pre-Vis on my live-action film, the one that didn’t get green-lit because of the pandemic. I was showing these Pre-Vis done in Unreal Engine 4.12 and studio executives and even actors were like wait, what is this? 

They were like ‘This looks like a video game cinematic or an animated film.’ And I was like ‘damn.’ And I remember going on a plane back from LA thinking ‘Why don’t we make a movie this way?’ So when the pandemic hit I’m like, ‘Well if we’re going to make an animated film, let’s do it in Unreal because with the render target, it is looking good. Unreal has kind of opened a lot of doors for us, dude.

Matthew Swigonski: You have the Max Beyond video game coming out soon as well. Did you make a movie tie-in for a video game or was it just the movie at first?

Hasraf Dulull: We always intended to just make a movie. It was never my intention to make a video game, it was only because I wanted to animate a car sequence. It was a lot of work so we just plugged the Xbox controller in, it’s like moving the car around, and… it was fun. We got the shots but it was fun. And then me, Andrea Tedeschi, my head of CG, and Sam Rabelo, who’s our lighting artist, were like, ‘You know, why don’t we just take a weekend and do what you call a game jam?’

So we migrated a couple of the assets, like some characters, a vehicle, and the environment into an Unreal game project. We just started messing about. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could play as the characters? Wouldn’t it be cool to play as a little kid who has powers?’ 

We ended up doing a rough demo and putting the game on Steam and it got battered to pieces. But what was cool was Microsoft saw it and said, ‘Hey you should apply for the ID Xbox program which is the Independent Developers Program and we got in. We actually have development kits on our desks and we’re about to sign with a publisher…because we had the freedom to experiment, thanks to the power of a real-time engine.

We ended up going from movie to video game very very quickly. And I think that’s a testament to technology but also allows us to be more risky. If this was a proper animated film with studios behind it with the conventional pipeline, that’s gonna cost a lot of money. There’s a lot of time we need for that separate team. For the Max Beyond game, we just got the same team working on the anime film and ended up putting together the playable demo version of the game within like a few months. And that was a game changer for us. No pun intended. 

Matthew Swigonski: No, that’s a good one. That pun is going into this article. 

Hasraf Dulull: Oh yes!

Matthew Swigonski: Watching the movie, you could definitely see that when Max is on Leon’s back that it has that video game feel to it. 

Hasraf Dulull: The funny thing is that in the original demo that we did, it was basically a single-player game where you play as Leon and Max is like an NPC that will just follow you and you could trigger off certain abilities as a single player.

And then as we were play-testing it, we’re like ‘Man, I want to play as Max. I want to be the kid with the abilities and do some stuff.’ So we end up doing a split-screen co-op version of the game. So what we ended up doing was going back and rescoping the game, making it smaller and removing the single-player game, and making it just a straight couch co-op game. Where two people can work together to achieve obstacles. All of a sudden we had a game that was not only fun and playable but you don’t even need to watch the movie to enjoy it

Matthew Swigonski: How do you go from this one small idea to this whole project with a movie and a video game? 

Hasraf Dulull: You know what, Matthew? Actually, the movie was originally a live-action film. It was originally live-action that became an animated film. And now also a video game and we’re potentially looking at comic books as well and for us. It is kind of the whole transmedia approach to making content.

We always think about what you call ‘multiple verticals.’ So if we make it a movie, what else could it be? You know, how can we keep this IP and extend its longevity? Because let’s face it, production companies like us and other production companies’ currency is content. That’s our currency. IP is our currency.

Matthew Swigonski: As you describe your background, it sounds like you’ve become a jack of all trades. 

Hasraf Dulull: I wouldn’t say jack of all trades. I just sort of ended up doing all of that, so you’re right. I always wanted to be a film director, right? But I didn’t go to film school. It was very expensive back in the day. And I just happened to love video games, you know? I was the guy with the Super Nintendo, Mega Drive, and GameBoy. I was just that nerd. So I just fell into video games because of my love for games. But I also knew there was a lot of storytelling you can do in video games. So I kind of used that as my platform to move me into film. 

It was only when I went into visual effects that I saw the complexities of making a movie. Like you see the directors are really stressed out. You see the politics that get on. When I became a VFX supervisor, I was less on the computer and more on the film set. So I got to understand how a film set works and what the pressures of that can be. 

Matthew Swigonski: If you had to describe Max Beyond in three words, what would they be? 

Hasraf Dulull: So three words or can it be three sentences?

Matthew Swigonski: We’ll give you the three sentences. 

Hasraf Dulull: I would say that it is a heartfelt movie. It is a visceral roller coaster ride. And the third one is that it’s a mind-bending genre twisted movie. You’re not going to expect what you’re gonna see every 10 minutes. It constantly changes. So, yeah, I would definitely say a heartfelt, warm, emotional movie. But just with bombastic wall-to-wall action, man, There’s just so much action.

Max Beyond will be released on digital platforms on April 22 in the UK and April 23 in the US.