Trunk - Meister

2026

A world built entirely by Meister, on our own terms. Our own ambition, realized through film.

Trunk is an original short film built entirely in Unreal Engine. Building worlds that people can step into isn't new to us. In fact, it's one of the things we do best. So when we finally made one that was ours, a world that had been living in our heads for years, Trunk is what came out.

We created the script, characters, environments, animation, design, and technology all ourselves 1. Because we could, and 2. Because we wanted to see what happens when we exercise our own ambition without any guardrails.

The technology wasn't the point. It’s what allowed us to be intentional with the outcome, move faster, experiment more, and treat the entire film as one connected creative system. Making it this way meant lighting, character keyframes, environments, animation, cameras, and rendering all lived inside the same world. Instead of waiting for renders to see whether something worked, we could see it immediately and make decisions in the moment.

Set over the course of a single night in a small town in West Dakota, the film follows Bert and Tony, two small-time gangsters who kidnap Jimmy after he steals from the local mob boss. Their plan quickly goes sideways when they discover they can't open the trunk of the car they've thrown him into.

We also found a way to give personality to a character you never really meet. You don't really ever get to meet Jimmy outside of the trunk, so we decided to hand his personality to the car instead. It won't start when it should, the doors don't work, and it drives Bert and Tony up the wall, turning an ordinary object into a stand-in for Jimmy himself.

Inspired by the visual language of classic crime stories and small-town thrillers, we took cues from films like Fargo and Spider-Verse, pushing that world through a more graphic, painted treatment.

We made it without compromises, from the texture details of a character to the way a whole city is lit. There was no gap between our capacity and our vision that we didn't close.

This was a world just waiting to be realized. So we built it, through original narrative and scripting, characters and technology, and we did it in a way that allowed us to express it exactly the way we wanted it to be experienced.