“Sojourn” is a short cinematic trailer I created in Unreal Engine. With a background in directing, animation and visual effects for Film and TV, this was my first project using Unreal — a challenging but incredibly rewarding learning experience. I hope you enjoy the film.
Hi there @Leabags,
Hope you’re well and having a wonderful week so far 
This was absolutely incredible from beginning to end. The animation, the “voices”, and the storyline all get you engaged immediately. It felt polished and high quality in the most impressive way. If you don’t mind me asking, what exactly inspired this cinematic?
Hey, thanks—that’s really kind of you.
At first, the whole thing started as a way for me to learn Unreal, i find it esier to lern things if I have a full project to do it in - that way your learning and discovery is guided by actual problems you need to solve.
My background’s in post-production and filmmaking (you can see more of my work here: davidlea.com), and I’d been wanting to move more into games and game cinematics. Then I realised I hadn’t actually done much “action” work over the years, so I thought it would be fun to choreograph a chase or a fight scene. The twist was making the hero a pacifist—someone who has to escape rather than fight. Framing it like a video game launch trailer felt like the perfect way to make it self-contained.
As for the actual idea, I’d been coming up with possible game worlds and narratives in my head ever since working with Creative Assembly on the narrative films for the Warhammer 3 video game. One of those ideas was about a pacifist robot trying to escape a totalitarian algorithm. That had been sitting in the back of my mind for a while, and it all kind of clicked into place one day while I was out for a walk.
hope that answers the question. Cheers!
Are you interested in making a trailer for my game? I would be willing to pay. You can contact me at Travisjohnson60@gmail.com and we can talk about details.