Animation:
I first did blocking animation for all active shots with animated characters, and imported those to UE5.Then I went back, and did splining and clean-up on those shots. If I had more time, I would have liked to do more clean-up work. But I’m okay with how the animation looks, and due to how dynamic UE5 is I can, in the future, do the clean-up work I want to do and reimport to UE5 for rendering. I do like that I won’t need to worry about going through an entire pipeline just to re-render improved animation, which UE5 makes much more simple. It is one of the reasons I’m very glad I learnt UE5 from Serra this semester, as I could potentially use it for future projects both at UAL and personal works to save time on parts of the pipeline I’m not as interested in perusing and learning. For example, I don’t like compositing in Nuke personally, but I found the live view ability of UE5 made making those counterpart adjustments and applications easier and faster.
Materials:
As mentioned previously, I remade and applied the materials for all of the rigs I used. While this was a little annoying and time consuming to do, once done for each rig I didn’t have to worry about it again until it came to the final render, where I made some tweaks to some of the materials.
I also changed and made my own materials for the subway train asset to make it look like the London Central line, as I wanted the film to feel more like my own experience with public anxiety so the film looking more like it takes place in London made most sense to me. For the seats, I roughly imitated the pattern used on most London underground seats in Photoshop, which I then applied to the Albedo texture for the seat assets. I also replaced most of the metal and wood materials, as I feel these aren’t nearly as common on the London underground, where everything is mostly a white matt material with black frames. To finish, I made some Decals using my own graffiti tag designs.
For the secondary characters, after the mood/lighting change I wanted them to be as void of personality as possible. I wanted the visuals to be representative of my experiences of working on my own social anxiety about people staring at me in public. I’ve found it helpful to question why people would be staring at me when I’m not doing anything outwardly worthy of watching, or thinking of times I’ve seen someone doing something weird and I maybe only glanced over momentarily before continuing to be more preoccupied with myself and my own thoughts and actions. All of those actions entail me thinking about the other person’s/people’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences as opposed to seeing them as void of those aspects and only focused on me. So if I wanted to add a twist to such a narrative, it makes sense to me that the people staring at the main character should be void of depth. Going back to my visual research, James Fenner’s works depict people as mostly silhouettes which I felt would work well for my idea. I made a flat, black material in UE5 and applied it to the skin, hair, eyes, and facial hair of the secondary characters in the ‘red lighting’ level to be representative of the above themes.
I also added 2D eyes to overlay the secondary characters. I found these shots to be a little boring and too static, so I added a jitter to the 2D eyes to give these shots some life. I realised later this worked well because the jittery eyes reflect the panic and instability of the feeling of these people staring at the main character.
Lighting:
I mostly went in and changed the colours of the lighting on the subway train asset, more so for the red lighting after the mood change mid way through the film. I did find it a bit difficult to not have the lighting too red, and essentially feel flat, so I would like to go back into UE5 after the submission and experiment more with the lighting.
I also added one point light each in front of the two characters in shot 0200, as they were too shadowed and the black silhouetted skin wasn’t as clear when not contrasted with their lit clothes. I also added both these lights to the sequencer so that I could key their visibility in the scene, otherwise they were too bright in other shots and looked odd.
Rendering
Even though I initially set the UE5 levels up in a way that I could have the lighting change during shot 0100 in engine, I kept having issues executing this. Eventually, I decided instead to render both the red lighting and the normal lighting separately, and edit them together later. Once I had set up a duplicate sequencer for the red lighting level, this was pretty straight forward.
For the sequencers, I made sure that the visibility of shot specific lights, alembic caches, and the 2D eyes were keyed so that they would only be visible during their set shots.
Editing
I edited my film in DaVinci Resolve. Most of the work was creating a satisfying transition from the normal lighting to the red lighting. I experimented with different methods (fading in, a glitch effect transition, suddenly changing the moment the main character opens his eyes again), and settled on the red lighting flicking quickly every so often up to the moment where the main character first glances over to the secondary character in shot 0140.
I also added in the sound. Early on in the project development, I found the track ‘Slow Trap’ by Anton Vlasov which I still wanted to use. I did have to cut and edit the track to fit with the film, but I’m pretty happy with the end result.