I did a lot of research into how films are lit and replicated a lot of the same techniques within Unreal Engine as opposed to lighting just using basic techniques. In general, I'm extremely into filmmaking and movies, which all influenced me heavily throughout the project, from themes to design, and most importantly, lighting. This all comes together to keep every section of Uplink feeling slightly new and fresh. I made sure to have fully exterior shots, interior with heavy exterior light, completely interior shots with no exterior light, and interior locales with minimal exterior light. The same idea goes for interior and exterior lighting. I added things like the fluorescent blue/purple lighting in the arcade, the harsh red alarm lighting in the control room as well as the green hologram light spilling onto the surroundings.
Going back to the idea of trying to stretch as much variation in the environments as possible, I took full advantage of this and tried to inject color and lighting-value variation throughout the cinematic without it feeling tacked on. We also used more elaborate 3D blockouts later down the line. I was responsible for the majority of these, and they were a lot of fun to put together! I tried to focus mainly on showing the tone and expression of each scene at this stage rather than the structure of the environments or character models. Shewayish: We used exclusively hand-drawn animatic-style storyboarding at first, eventually blended in some live-action footage we recorded at home. It took a lot of time and communication to come up with a story that everyone felt happy with. We spent almost half our time on just pre-production. Since we started our earliest concept stages around June, it took us just under a year overall, though the bulk of the work started in September.Ĭould you share some of your story-boarding techniques?īendziute: This involved lots of going back and forth between ideas, lots of streamlining, and compromising.
We had free reign to do pretty much anything! The only constraint was time. Shewayish: We were quite fortunate that the assignment for the final major project at Herts is very unrestrictive. This meant we had nine months to create an entire short film from scratch with a core team of four. What were the parameters around this project? Did you have time constraints? How long did the development take?īendziute: We had our third year to create the project, from the conceptualization phase to finishing the cinematic. Overall, creating a cinematic really allowed us to push the engine to its limits to create a much higher quality final product.
Creating a cinematic also allowed me to push Unreal Engine to its limits by using the movie renderer to render higher quality frames straight from Unreal Engine. It also allowed me personally to fully utilize my time creating environments for specific shots that were much more linear and focused as opposed to a fully playable open game. We realized we were really capable here, enjoyed this aspect, and really wanted to tell a short story while also focusing all of our time into a much more concise, linear experience. We had previously made a gameplay demo with Spire last year and experimented with small cinematic sections within it. Although a lot of ideas were thrown away, this let us maintain the themes and ideas we liked among all the chaos to create Uplink. This really allowed a lot of free-flowing ideas to be bounced back and forth. YouTube, Vimeo, Open Education resources), and with publisher educational resources.Callow: In the pre-production phase of Uplink, we all tried to throw around as many ideas as we could, no matter how crazy they might be. Google Apps at UMass Amherst and OWL), as well as with external services (e.g.
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