Working on my final year project has been an incredible experience. It was the longest and most challenging project I’ve ever done, and honestly, managing everything was tough at times. But looking back, I’m so proud of how it turned out. I couldn’t have done it without the help of George and Serra who gave me tons of useful feedback to make the project what it is today.
The process started with a lot of planning. I spent time working on the story and figuring out how I wanted the film to look. Storyboarding was my first big step, it helped me organize the flow of the film and decide on things like camera angles and the mood of each shot. I wanted the story to feel engaging and clear, so I kept revising my boards and ideas until I was happy with them. Serra really helped me fine-tune things and get everything on the right track.
Once I had the story down, I dove into animation and building the scenes. For the animation, I used motion capture with the Rokoko suit to record realistic movements for the robot character. But capturing the data was just the start, I spent a lot of time cleaning up the animation, fixing issues like stiff movements, and making sure everything looked smooth and natural. George gave me great advice on this, like how to adjust timing or improve the weight shifts to make the actions feel believable.
On the environment side, I modelled most of the props myself, but I also mixed in some pre-made assets to save time. It was a bit tricky to make everything look cohesive since I wanted the world to feel like one unified space. I added small details, like wires and scratches, to make the scenes feel more real. For the terrains, I used Gaea, which let me design realistic landscapes with nice details like erosion and texture blending. Once I had the terrains, I used Houdini to turn them into 3D models and optimize them so they’d work well in my scenes.
Trees were another important part of the environment. I made different types of trees, like cypress, oak, and sugar maple, using SpeedTree. I created about 8 to 10 variations with different shapes and leaf densities to avoid making the forest look repetitive. SpeedTree made it easier to tweak things like branch curves and leaf placement, and I made sure the trees would look good under different lighting conditions.
Lighting was one of the most detailed parts of the project. I used different lighting setups depending on the mood of each scene. For example, when the time-travel device glitches, I added red lighting to make it feel intense, and for normal operation, I used blue to show stability. I also used atmospheric effects, like haze, to add depth. A big challenge was making sure the lighting matched across different shots, especially since some scenes were rendered in Unreal Engine and others in Redshift.
Rendering was probably the hardest part of the project. I wanted high-quality results, so I used path tracing for some scenes, but it made the render times really long. The school render farm only had two computers that could handle GPU rendering, so I had to juggle between those, my laptop, and other school computers to get everything done. Sometimes renders failed, and I had to re-do them, but in the end, it all came together.
After rendering, I brought everything into Nuke for compositing. Nuke let me fix small issues, like cleaning up noise in reflections, and add final touches like motion blur and depth effects. I even added a sky to my establishing shot in post-production. Then, I exported the shots and edited them all together in Premiere Pro. Finding the right soundtrack was harder than I expected, I wanted something that felt epic and matched the sci-fi vibe of the film, but it also had to be royalty-free. After a lot of searching, I finally found the perfect music and added sound effects, like the time-travel explosion, to tie everything together.
This project taught me so much. It wasn’t easy managing all the moving parts, especially over such a long period, but I’ve learned a ton about storytelling, animation, and technical workflows. I’m really thankful for George and Serra’s support, they helped me push through the challenges and improve my work. I had a great time working on this project, and I can’t wait to showcase my film and see how people react to it.