Among Us: A Creative Journey from Gaming Sensation to Highly-Anticipated Animated Series panel concluded today in the setting of Cinema Barberini during the first day of MIA | International Audiovisual Market.
The focus of the panel in the Animation section of MIA was Among Us, the animated series from CBS Studios and Inner Sloth based on the social deception and multi-player game that has taken the world by storm and engaged more than 500 million monthly active users, racking up more than 4 billion views on YouTube and more than 1.22 billion viewing sessions on Twitch in the fourth quarter of 2020 alone.
Headlining the talk was Owen Dennis, creator of the series, who in a conversation moderated by Jesse Whittock, International TV Co-Editor at Deadline, talked about the journey and challenges of adapting a video game with planetary success. And of this success Dennis traced the perimeter: “There were 500 million people a month playing this game and 2.2 billion streamers on Twitch. One in thirteen phones had this game, and those numbers made us think, ‘Who isn’t this series for?’ If you played the game and weren’t traumatized, then the show is definitely for you.”
About the main challenges, Dennis related, “We had to make sure the character dynamics were appropriate and that they had motivations.Each episode is 12 minutes long, so trying to do it for 11 characters was kind of a fun challenge. And then we had to have them killed by an alien.” Still on this theme, he added, “They don’t have faces so it was a challenge how to get them to show emotion (…) and with eleven people talking in a room with no faces it was hard to make each character stand out, they each had to have a very distinctive voice.”
Among us will also feature a stellar cast, with the voices of Elijah Wood, Dan Stevens, Yvette Nicole Brown, Ashley Johnson, and Patton Oswalt.
