Marek Stolun: Prague studio All Animal remakes Heroes III scenes

Marek Štolun, head of the Prague studio All Animal, admits he has clocked around a thousand hours in Heroes of Might and Magic III — and now his team is helping create a remake of the legendary strategy game for Ubisoft, producing the cinematic sequences first unveiled at Gamescom.

The project is Heroes of Might and Magic III Remake, revealed on Tuesday evening at the opening of one of the world's most prestigious gaming expos. Ubisoft is making the game, with release planned for next year, and Czechs have made a notable contribution to it.

The Prague studio All Animal produced not only the promotional video but also ten cinematic scenes woven between the game's missions — 3 minutes and 42 seconds of footage in total, reimagining the legendary "movies" from the original 1998 game.

"We wanted to keep the emotional power of the original nineties cutscenes while bringing them up to modern visual standards," Štolun says. According to him, the team carefully mimicked the optics of real Canon lenses, natural lens flares, chromatic aberration and a "tangible" colour grade, so the dark fantasy scenes would look cinematic rather than sterile and digital.

The collaboration began five years ago, when studio staffer Radim Zajíček rebuilt the castle from the original game in 3D using Unreal Engine 5, purely for his own enjoyment, and posted the work on ArtStation. It caught the eye of the creative director at Ubisoft's Chengdu studio, the division working on the remake.

What started as a cool first contact turned into a concrete assignment at the end of 2024: the team had to take flat 2D characters and turn them into three-dimensional models. The main heroine, Catherine, took up the most time — her look ended up being rebuilt from scratch at All Animal. "At first we wanted to make her more comic-book-like, but in the end we shifted toward photorealism," Štolun explains.

At the same time, the script for the videos was being rewritten to fit within a limited budget: "We spent two months reworking it, rewrote it completely, trimmed it down to fit what the production could actually handle." All the scenes can also be watched together as a stand-alone short film running just under four minutes.

The Czech team impressed Ubisoft's developers so much that they now plan to use the character models directly in the game itself. "What struck us most was their willingness to always go further. Instead of simply following the brief or delivering exactly what we asked for, the team kept bringing their own creative ideas, which helped us realise the project's true vision," says Eric Damian-Verney, brand director at Ubisoft.

All Animal is no newcomer to the industry: the studio works regularly with another gaming giant, Blizzard, making trailers — including around five a year for World of Warcraft. Its most recent high-profile work was the trailer for a joint project between Blizzard and Wizards of the Coast, the Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft rulebook, which racked up more than three million views in three days. "Probably our most successful video yet," Štolun notes.

Alongside this, the entrepreneur has another game project on the go — an unusual shooter called "The Jiří Kára Simulator," based on the viral YouTube video "Jiří Kára's Wedding." A crowdfunding campaign on the Startovač platform, with a goal of 450,000 crowns, raised more than 1.2 million crowns. "At that point it became a real commitment to the people who backed it — since then I've been part of the project myself, helping push the game forward," Štolun says of the "boomer shooter" genre.