Unity acquires Digital Monarch Media

Unity Technologies, a Copenhagen-founded and San Francisco-located company providing a development platform for creating 2D, 3D, virtual and augmented reality games and experiences, announced that it acquired Digital Monarch Media and the proprietary technology it built on Unity to pioneer virtual cinematography for feature films.

Digital Monarch Media, founded in 2014, is a Vancouver, Canada-based company centered around virtual cinematography.

The financial details of the transaction remain undisclosed.

Under the terms of this acquisition, the team at DMM and co-founders Wes Potter and Habib Zargarpour will join Unity’s dedicated film group, reporting to Unity’s Chief Revenue Officer, Dave Rhodes.

Potter and Zargarpour’s backgrounds working in games (Need for Speed franchise, James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing) and film (Twister, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace) inspired them to use Unity’s real-time technology to speed up the VFX pipeline for films. Together, they created Expozure, a virtual cinematography platform that has been used by Steven Spielberg (Ready Player One), Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049) and Jon Favreau (The Jungle Book).

The acquisition adds to Unity’s ambitions to bring real-time filmmaking to animation with recent projects like the Baymax Dreams shorts in Disney Television Animation’s Big Hero 6 The Series, Neill Blomkamp’s ADAM: Episode 2 and Crow: The Legend from Baobab Studios.