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Sideways MV (ft. Lil Mixie)
During the Spring 2022 Semester, for my final project for a Mixed Reality Compositing course, I had the amazing opportunity to collaborate with a small team of three to create a music video in five weeks for Lil Mixie's song Sideways. I was responsible for the 3D side of the project using Unreal Engine 5 as well as some mixed reality compositing shots involving our artist green-screened and composited into the 3D worlds.
I created three concept worlds in Unreal based on some storyboards provided by our creative director.
I wanted to make collaboration a priority so I made a ton of easily customizable blueprint materials and a few actors to be able to tweak things instantly real-time during our meetings.
To have proper contrast and narrative cohesion, we went through a lot of discussions and it's crazy how much changed in a few weeks, but luckily with my preparations changes were easy to make and just as easy to reverse since I saved iteratively.
You can see how different these new worlds are in comparison to the previous ones.
After we tweaked these sets a bit more to fit the creative director's vision, our team had the artist herself fly in and we collected some greenscreen shots.
Then, our two talented post-production artists keyed out and sent me the image files to bring back into Unreal Engine.
We worked closely together as we rendered out the final scenes and stayed in the studio overnight to get the final product out! There were a few issues with render quality, but we all definitely learned a LOT from this project.
Any glaring quality issues were taken care of with After Effects and Premiere Pro, while I just turned my laptop into a render farm churning out images to use for our music video
Our project was quite ambitious from the start. Creating a music video in five weeks was no easy task, but we were able to get a finished product and a pat on the back to everyone on my team that worked together to bring this project to life!
Unfortunately, due to some logistical issues, we weren't able to get the music video up, at least not anytime soon. But then again this was the first time I ever worked on a music video, so I'm quite proud of the product we were able to make.
Conclusion
This project taught me a ton about collaboration with non-3D artists and I was able to get a better idea of how to prepare my worlds and materials ahead of time such that I can basically do a real-time VJ performance in front of my team as I swap out colors, materials, and objects to properly fit our creative vision.
There were a few rendering setting hiccups that encountered as well that really helped me strengthen my attention to detail and just experiment with a lot of Unreal Engine features such as dynamically moving materials and compositing in Unreal Engine.
Moving forward I definitely will apply more care to my render settings and do test renders to ensure the quality is good before spending an hour rendering out a scene only to find a problem in the images, and I'll continue to sharpen my cooperative practices to have easily customizable work for smoother teamwork. I also will move on knowing that not every project will end in a complete success, but to pick out what I did well and what I could've done better on and learn from the experience.
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