The Third Floor turned twenty years of previs into a feature film

The picture

The Third Floor's own history page says the company 'started out in 2004 with a handful of dedicated artists' doing previs for other people's productions. Twenty-one years later, on 6 June 2025, the studio released 'Predator: Killer of Killers' on Hulu, and its homepage now calls the film 'our first Animated Feature, taking us well beyond previsualization and into the business of crafting final images.' Cartoon Brew's interview with chief creative officer and co-founder Joshua Wassung, published the day before the Hulu debut, records the credit precisely: Wassung and writer-director Dan Trachtenberg share the co-director title on the finished film.

What the documents show

Wassung's account to Cartoon Brew dates the underlying investment specifically: The Third Floor had been 'investing in the department since 2020,' building an Unreal Engine animation pipeline in parallel with previs and postvis work on Trachtenberg's live-action 'Prey.' Once given a full greenlight, the crew scaled from roughly 60 people to a peak of 165, delivered a first full cut on 23 December 2023, and handed over the final sequence in June 2024, an eighteen-month production Wassung credits to reusing a previs-grade real-time lighting and compositing pipeline for final frames, with roughly 80 percent of compositing finished before render. The studio's own site corroborates the headline claim but, unlike the interview, gives no schedule or team-size figures of its own; those rest on Wassung's account alone.

What it is allowed to decide

A finished, distributed feature is by definition a class 6, regulated artifact in the sense that matters here: it is the final commercial product, not a planning aid awaiting someone else's approval. That is a different claim from saying the underlying previs pipeline itself carries every authority a final frame needs. The sources establish Auditability for the studio's process, since Wassung describes a versioned, iterated pipeline with dated cuts and screenings, but say nothing about Provenance for individual assets beyond the in-house pipeline, as neither source itemises asset licensing or vendor sourcing for the finished film.

The disclosure label

In the site's format: a 2025 animated feature produced by a studio previously known only for previs, pitchvis and techvis; class 6, since it is the delivered final product rather than an approval aid; holds Auditability, given the studio's own documented iteration and delivery schedule; does not hold a demonstrated Provenance record for its constituent assets in the sources available; dated 16 September 2026; the claim of a 'first' is the studio's own.

• When a previs vendor becomes a production studio, does its previs-era disclosure practice carry over to final frames?
• What did the eighteen-month schedule assume about outside vendor teams working inside the studio's own pipeline?
• Does 'first animated feature' distinguish a wholly owned production from a heavily previs-assisted one?

The more durable fact here is not the film itself but the conversion: a company built to plan other people's shots spent five years building the pipeline to finish its own.