I am thrilled to share the short film we created for the Epic Games' Shorts India Program 2023.
It was an exhilarating experience to lead the team for this project. We worked tirelessly to make this production happen with a small team, pouring all our efforts into making this film.
In Mid 2023, when Epic opened the registration for this program we sent our pitch and were thrilled to be selected as one of the ten teams from India to participate. The program itself was an incredible experience, with top-notch instructors providing training sessions that covered everything from the basics to the final render inside the Engine, as well as guest speakers and the support of technical teams and mentors.
This is the second iteration of the program. The first one happened in 2021, where our film DEVMASA was the winner.
You can watch the final film down below. The trailer cut is here.
Film's Logline:
"In a futuristic world, a group of strangers is trying to steal Plant Communication Devices from an exploiting corporation to preserve and restore the delicate balance of their environment."
HQ Image Renders are attached in the Assets section.
This Behance post only highlights and covers the work that I put towards this short film and is not a collective project post by our team. I have included the profile links of the team members at the end of this post if you would want to contact them.
LIGHTING
I worked on lighting for the following environments and scenes.
We were experimenting to lock a look&feel at the start of the project and we discovered that stylised lighting in pathtracer looked absolutely nuts - it even killed the typical Unreal lighting look. But later, we had to settle down to Lumen becuase of the fast paced timeline (We were rendering till the very last minute) we had.
From the start, I wanted to do something very abstract and experiment with strong colors that would fit the mood of the scene. At this time, I was heavily inspired by the video series, "Stories from the Outlands" from Apex Legends, because of the art style they had. There is a very strong keylight that would highlight these characters' edges in a pleasing way. They always play with strong colors creating a stylised look. I very much followed that and eventually it became the Lighting style of our film too.
The blueprint of the whole film - Blockouts! I worked on the blockouts for every shot in this movie. Blocking out involved staging of the assets, environment layout, cameras and characters with basic animations. Only when the blockout is done, the next person can pick it up for propping, animation and lighting. This work took most of my time in this project.
The following images show the scenes that I worked on the Environments for it.
All of our assets majorly came from Kitbash3D and some from the Unreal Marketplace.
The city was one of my favourites. The buildings were majorly distributed procedurally through PCG while the main buildings we handplaced to maintain a good composition. I wanted to do more fidelity on the city, but I called this enough as we were racing against the time.
I also worked on rest of the envrionments along with other artists.
MOTION CAPTURE
We had a day with Movella's XSens suits for our Short. Epic had partnered with Movella and our team was given a full day to use their top end MVN Link suits for our body capture. It was fun, I finally got to wear a mocap suit - have been only seeing this in BTS videos online till now.
I was also amazed by the fact how realtime it was.
After a day of acting, a quick batch cleanup of anims within their software, we almost had about 30-40 animation tracks from the mocap session ready for final use. Wherever we would see a flaw in data of these mocap anims, we always managed to hide it with an alternate camera cut, our animators also fixed several shots by using Control Rigs.
After a day of acting, a quick batch cleanup of anims within their software, we almost had about 30-40 animation tracks from the mocap session ready for final use. Wherever we would see a flaw in data of these mocap anims, we always managed to hide it with an alternate camera cut, our animators also fixed several shots by using Control Rigs.
There were many other shots that required more than just acting. We did not have a professional stunt person or a good actor in the team to put the suit on, we only did actions that was possible by us. For these kind of action shots, we got the anims from Actor Core store and Mixamo. Our animators would then animate on top of this and for shots we couldn't do mocap or find anims online, they would do keyframed animations using Control Rigs.
During body mocap session, we were using this DIY helmet to mount the iPhone for facial capture, it didn't work sadly. We couldn't get proper data out of it. One lession that we learnt from is that, we would need this camera to look dead straight to our nose in head level for the data to process correctly.
I originally worked with the Voice actors to capture facial performance for use with Metahuman animator. This along with many more animations from my own performance, we were able to make these Metahumans talk. For some shots, the anim track we got from the Metahuman animator just didn't work, lips would go wrong, the pupil would roll crazy like it's haunted - We then decided to put sunglasses to the characters on song sequence to hide it.
EDITING
Finally, I have edited a film for the first time ever. The edited film was then sent over to the Sound Mixing studio where two other artists worked on it and had to come up with master audio all under 2 days of time.
THE CREW
THE CORE 3D TEAM
Prabhu Ram (Myself) - Blockouts, Set Dressing, Lighting, Cinematics, Post Process, Project Lead and Supervising
Jegan Devaraj - FX for full film, Set Dressing, Lighting
Harsh Patel - Tech Anim, Set Dressing, Lighting
Harshit Penamata - Set Dressing, Lighting
Santhosh Ganesan - Writing, Direction, Set Dressing, Cinematics, Lighting, Supervising
Manmohan Manoj - Character Art, Tech Anim, Tech Art
ADDITIONAL HELP
Sanaldeep - Anim Cleanup
DIALOGUES
Daniel Henry
SOUND MIXING
Kewyn Frederick
Shriram Chandrashekar
Dayananth Chandran
VOICE OVER TALENT
Daniel Henry - Board Room Speaker
Deepak Paramesh - Kamal
Aarthi - Meera, Lakshmi
Jacob Leo - Rajan
FOR SHORTS INDIA PROGRAM 2023
Presented by Epic Games.
Organised by Green Rain Studios.
Supported by Movella, XSens
THANKS TO OUR MENTOR
Suresh Eriyat
Suresh Eriyat
PRODUCERS AT EPIC
Shruti Verma
Supreet Kaur
Anjana Tirkey
Gaurav Mathur
PRODUCERS AT GREEN RAIN
Rounak Magoo
Karan Parikh
Sachin Jha
EXECUTIVES AT MOVELLA
Gangatharan Gopal
Gangatharan Gopal
Santhosh Victor
ASSETS
3D Models
Kitbash3D
Megascans
Several assets from Unreal Marketplace
Several assets from Sketchfab
Animation Tracks
ActorCore
Backgorund Music
Epidemic Sound
The Millers Gang, ftw!
I'm happy to have made this with my colleagues who turned into amazing friends. We miss those days of being together on The Mill (Bangalore) floor. But after many months we had this opportunity to come back together in creating something and it was so much fun. Despite the challenges, juggling with time whilst on our dayjobs, the end result was worth it all! It's inspiring to see what we've accomplished and motivates me to push even harder.
Thank you!
