Welcome to the assorted exports of my time learning and exploring various technologies for Cinematic story telling.
The following are either short pieces I made while exploring Unreal Engine, Blender, Premiere, After Effects etc.
I have ADHD and that often means I start tons of fun personal projects and finish a certain phase of the project before forgetting that I was working on it and finding the new thing to chase down. Later I'll discover the export and realize I never did x, y, z to really finish it.
In that regard they should be seen as "Works In Progress" although for many - sadly - they will not see any more progress than where they are. They are meant to showcase my continued desire to learn and grow more so than my perfect vision of each. Hope you enjoy, and on the off chance you see something you'd love to see reach a fuller version reach out - the motivation to continue may no longer be self fulfilling but it can always be re-ignited.
In this piece I was exploring what I could make with the new midjourney video generation tools, this was before they implemented the first and last frame abilities. I also wanted to explore the ability to make the assets into 3d objects and Pre-vis the vehicle moments in blender with those assets.
This was also the project that lead me to build out a Python script to prep and import the pngs exports from Shot Manager into After Effects for the composite work. Blog post about that here.
Despite being Pre-Vis conceptually, I wanted to be able use my Red Giant Universe VFX filter pack on different layers of the 3d environment, so I explored the ability to export layers in PNG sequences, this allowed for the streaks and other little timing block out vfx to show more of the color and tone I was envisioning while working through this.
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This piece was in part to see how long it would take to make a short vlog like video post using as much A.I. while also utilizing traditional content creation routes like Photoshop, after effects, premiere, and other ways to alter images and video.
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This piece is a current WIP, I'm working on implementing cinematics into a point and click framework gameplay pack that I have in my Unreal Library. This has Reallusion character models and I'm doing the animations using the A.I. assisted software in Iclone and the Unreal pipeline stack from Reallusion. I'm doing the scratch VO myself and the music is A.I. as is the baby crying and the other sound effects. It's very early as I've had to move away from working on it at the moment but I do hope to return to this sequence of scenes soon. Currently the scene fires in game when you hit play and then there are player choices after the scene that I'm working through hooking up each choice to have its own cinematic.
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This piece is a WIP for a promo for a bigger concept that I have. It utilizes the Reallusion, Unreal Pipeline. I took my VO and ran it through an A.I. filter. The Music is A.I. it features a lot of A.I. images within the shots. I created several sets in Unreal and even created assets in Blender for the piece, the "RetopoZone" includes pieces I created as well as assets from KitBash3d. It was my first attempt at learning the A.I. assisted animation tools in Iclone. It become a much more complicated piece and I ran into some tech issues - the face materials popping etc. It was taking far longer than I was expecting and I've since moved away from it.
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This piece is a completed entry! It is an all A.I. music video. I created the song with Suno AI. All the clips are created with mid-journey images using a mask that I made in real life as a modifier in the prompt stack, then using various A.I. video generators I made dozens of clips and edited the piece in Adobe Premiere.
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These two pieces are my exploration of making an A.I. Music video. The song is an A.I. song made with Suno AI, and the second video is taking the first video in small clips and running it through RunwayML. The first video includes my exploration of a Vive Tracker mocap setup - I'm doing all the motion for the singer. This uses a model from Reallusions Character create suite as well as an Epic Games Meta Human head with a Face Capture that I also recorded. I connected the Meta Human Head to the Reallusion body in Unreal and combined the performances.
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In this piece I was exploring Unreal Engine, Reallusion Character create, and Iclone as well as some Mocap animations available through Reallusion. I customized the octagon and made some bumper graphics with A.I. and Adobe After effects. Eventually I'd like to do some longer fight sequences, but alas I have moved along to other projects.
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This piece was from when I first started learning Blender and Unreal engine back in about 2019. I was exploring kitbashing with the free assets in Unreal as well as learning to 3d model in Blender, creating materials and learning the ins and outs of what was possible. The Universe being built in this is still something I'm exploring and I will be uploading some subsequence Baltan pieces.
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This piece is from about 2019. I had a bunch of footage I shot for test footage for a bigger project and wanted to work on the linking the footage props and over all tone of the bigger project, so I worked out this ritual moment for one of the characters. Never finished the bigger piece and never did much with this; so without additional fanfare here is the Dr. Pojak - Unmitigated Communion short test piece.
I also made a quick fake trailer to tease out some more of the flavor of the bigger idea. Here is that work in progress - clearly this is not a "netflix original" but you get the point....