What I've Done

Summary

This short film was an idea I had in late 2022 while regularly listening to Chet Baker's music. Hearing "I Get Along Without You Very Well" immediately inspired me to tell this story. The result is a cinematic thriller rendered entirely inside Unreal Engine 5.

What I Learned

My final project for an Advanced Animation course with CGPro. I learned how to use Metahumans, Rokoko Motion Capture, Niagara VFX, and multiple media plates — bringing together nearly every discipline of real-time filmmaking in a single production.

Summary

A short film following a Pirate as he ventures to find a legendary gem deep in a cave. The story is told through small cinematic snapshots — stylized, atmospheric, and told like a moving storyboard.

What I Learned

The three main skills I developed were Unreal Engine's water simulation system, setting up buoyancy to make the pirate ship float convincingly, and mastering the weather and sky system introduced by the plugin Ultra Dynamic Sky.

Summary

An HD-2D style game about a young hero who must befriend Death for a second chance at saving the world. My goal was to build narrative branches, trigger cutscenes, and construct larger explorable environments.

Narrative Design

I used the Unreal Engine plugin Narrative 3 to build dialogue trees that require prerequisites, trigger in-world events, and initiate quests — giving the story real systemic weight beyond surface-level dialogue.

Blueprints & Programming

I coded the main character from scratch: movement, jumping, dashing, and attacking — all as a 2D sprite in a 3D world. Enemies received AI task lists. The most challenging system was a heart-based health UI, which I solved through original problem-solving when documentation fell short.

Summary

This scene is from the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline — a moment I'd always envisioned while reading. My goal was to bring it to life as faithfully as possible, using dialogue and sound design referenced directly from the source material.

What I Learned

This production taught me Unreal Engine's Sequencer for cinematic storytelling, Character Animation, professional Motion Capture workflows, and the Movie Render Queue for high-quality final output — a comprehensive real-time filmmaking exercise from concept to export.