It took me almost 6 months to make the music video while learning how to use the program.
There were weeks when I didn’t even touch my computer, and weeks when I barely left it. I went through a lot of love-hate moments with Unreal Engine during the process, but overall I had a really positive experience. The basics of creating cinematics turned out to be pretty easy, especially since I already had some experience with video editing. This helped me get started quickly and stay motivated. Strangely enough, the first thing I did was create the sets. I really wanted to find the right atmosphere before I started adding characters. As I started working on the animatic, I kept discovering new things about the story and adding and changing elements along the way. At some point, I felt like it was time to stop and focus on production.
The hardest part of the process was dealing with the constant crashes of Unreal Engine, from D3D errors to control rig issues. I’m sure I could have figured them out eventually, but I decided to just adapt to them and focus on the project. Another challenge was working with long shots and animating the characters and cameras within them. To be safe, I decided to split the music video into two long shots, one in the winter city and one in the summer nature. I specifically chose a moment in the song and story to cut between them. However, even this didn’t save me from the difficulties of working with character animation and camera. If I fixed something at the end of a scene, I could accidentally ruin the beginning, since it’s all one continuous sequence.
I recorded all of the motion capture in move.ai. I liked how simple it was to use, but it seemed to be better suited for dynamic movements. There was a lot of jittering, so I decided to clean everything up manually inside Unreal Engine, and I may have gone a bit overboard. Most of the movements turned out very smooth, but I thought they still worked for the slow, surreal narrative. I created some scenes, like the flight over the forest, completely manually. It was a lot of fun, even though it didn’t turn out exactly how I imagined it. I made a note to myself to figure out how to create a control rig that works for me before I start animating my next project.
I learned that it’s important to remember that you’re creating an animation and obsessing over photorealistic graphics can only lead to frustration and distract you from the most important thing: telling a story. I spent a lot of time reworking the light and materials, but at some point I realized that my current version didn’t look much better than it did a few months ago.
The final render was at 2/32 anti-aliasing settings, 1920x1080 resolution, and screenspace 150. I really wanted to increase the AA value and resolution to 4K, but my computer couldn’t handle it. I haven’t figured out how to fix the pixel noise in the hair reflections yet, but I hope to figure it out for my next project.
