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THE LAB

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Narrative Cinematic Built in Unreal Sequencer

Here's my first full short film created in Unreal Engine 5. While there were certainly some bumps along the way, it was an amazing learning experience, and I am thrilled with how it turned out. The film draws heavily on the suspenseful elements of Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien, as well as the tense cinematics from The Last of Us Part II.

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Responsible for Layout, Animation Retargeting, Camera, Editing, Environment Creation, Lighting, Rendering, and Audio Mixing.

The Character

I sourced the Hazmat character from the marketplace and modified it by replacing the original head with a Metahuman head, allowing for greater facial control and expressiveness. All animation retargeting was performed in Unreal Engine 5 using the IK Rig and Retargeter tools. As I didn’t have access to motion capture equipment, I utilised the Mixamo animation library.​

To ensure a wide variety of animations, I implemented an animation blueprint featuring a ‘Slot’ system, which allowed me to mix and match animations for specific body parts. For certain shots, I refined the motion capture further by using the automatic FK Control Rig, adding hand-keyed tweaks to achieve more precise movements.​​

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Initial Block Out

On review, my initial block-out needed a lot of work, but it provided a solid base to improve upon! This first block-out lacked the tension I was aiming for, so I decided to add a temporary track inspired by one of the film’s influences - Alien (1979). With the temporary track now in the engine, the issue became clear: the cut was far too fast for the atmosphere I wanted to create.​

In-engine Preview​

The majority of the cinematic was created purely in Unreal Engine - including the editing, with small tweaks added out of the engine. Here is an in-engine preview running at 3x speed.

Assets List

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Software

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Unreal Engine 5

Adobe Premiere Pro (Audio Mixing)

Photoshop

Blender

Mixamo

Metahuman Creator

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