During my third and last module at Escape Studios, I gave my all in order to learn special effects, blueprints, the Niagara System, and plenty of shader magic!
Using these skills, I created a beach scene inspired by Remedy's Alan Wake and Control with just a hint of Blair Witch project in the mix. Of course, Disco Elysium's universe of gloom and fog always sneaks its way into my projects, as well.
I gave special care to the ocean, which took a while to get perfect as typical water shaders are practically invisible in a foggy and dark night environment, so I set out to learn a lot about specular highlights, panning textures and layering effects in order to get a realistic result. I also gave special attention to the rain. With rain comes surface wetness, drops on the camera lens, ripples on the floor, wind and particles, and I really pushed my skills to create a realistic effect.
The elephant in the room of my project, my own personal big monster, is the sheer amount of key-framing I had to do to sell the animated movement of the handheld camera bobbing along to the character's walking, running, jumping, crouching. With this, I also had to individually keyframe the torchlight so that it could be used as a narrative tool to convey the character's emotions in contrast to the very normal events happening around and to him.
With some depth of field adjustments, chromatic aberration, key-framed foley and lighting, the project was done!
I am very excited with how the short film came out. We only had a minute to tell a story and I'm very happy with what I could cram into these 60 seconds.