Submission
Showreel Animation Kewin Skrzekut
Design Proposal
Reflecting on the experience of working on the project in UE5
I had no prior knowledge or experience with game engines before starting this module. At first, I was extremely intimidated by the interface and the level of sophistication, so it took me a while to wrap my head around it. However, after working on this project, I’ve gained control over the navigation and the level of comfort necessary to explore further. Overall, throughout my time in this module, I’ve built a strong foundation in Unreal Engine, which I plan to put into further practice.
As a UE beginner, I initially struggled to come up with a project idea because I wasn’t fully aware of what was possible to achieve. After watching numerous YouTube videos showcasing Unreal projects, I had a vague idea of where I could take my project, but it wasn’t until I started implementing my own ideas as the project progressed that I understood the full range of possibilities—beyond the predominance of the game industry. As a result, I stumbled, and my project ended up being somewhat meandering.
My approach to this first encounter with Unreal Engine was to learn and practice a hard set of skills. As such, my work on the project was mostly exploratory, with a focus on technical implementation. Going beyond the techniques taught in class, I was particularly interested in procedural techniques for world creation, which required me to learn node-based coding within the UE5 interface. This took up most of the time spent on the project, mainly due to the range of tutorials available online being outdated and often causing confusion. Additionally, optimization issues and frequent crashes of Unreal Engine—due to the excessive computational power required for generating environment elements using multiple point clouds—added to the challenge. I worked with stochastic functions, such as random seeds or noise, and other mathematical calculations across different point clouds for purposes like intersection detection and asset subtraction to prevent overlap. During the initial attempts and learning PCG, the computer’s power often exceeded its limits, leading to crashes—one incident at the Digital Space caused the system to crash, resulting in the loss of an entire day’s work, as the PCs there are set to erase all data upon crashing. This painful lesson taught me the importance of saving regularly and backing up my work to an external drive.
Initially, I envisioned setting the aesthetics of my scene in surrealism, inspired by certain paintings. After my first consultation with Serra, I received feedback that led me to further explore this idea. I began reading The Red Book by Carl Jung and researching Salvador Dalí’s experiments with sleep and dreams. Dalí often intentionally interrupted his sleep cycles to explore the unconscious mind and capture his dreamlike visual experiences. This became a key inspiration for my project, drawing on the psychedelic, mysterious landscapes he created. From surrealist art, my inspiration expanded into film and cinematography. The examples that stuck with me were those that created suspense and mystery, often using unusual shots and perspectives, like Dutch angles, which gave an uneasy impression. This led me to explore Stanley Kubrick’s famous bird’s-eye angles and camera movements, incorporating the principles I learned in Nigel’s animation and cinematography theory classes.
Transitioning from a creative tech background into the School of Screen, I decided to approach this project from a technical perspective and learn the engine in order to become more confident and proficient in its use. I also aimed to incorporate the theoretical knowledge of cinema and visual storytelling through framing, as taught in Nigel’s class. This was a great opportunity to integrate skills and knowledge across modules from the first term. As a result, I now have a better understanding of camera animation and the shots that underpin a visual narrative.
The establishing shot is a wide-angle view showing a mountain-like landscape in the background, with the sunset over the forest. This signals to the audience that time is passing and the day is transitioning into night. The closing scene shows the car driving into the forest, coming to a stop as the road ends. The camera then zooms out to capture the full perspective of the forested area from a bird’s-eye view, revealing a question mark-shaped negative space, where the forest has been deforested due to the road cutting through it. To enhance the odd and uneasy aesthetic, I used chromatic aberration with the post-processing volume.
My final work is a short film that predominantly showcases the movement of a car through a landscape, driving into an upside-down world at dusk, when day transitions to night—the unknown, the questioned. The mise en scène is modest and can be broken down into several elements: the car with dynamic lights, the terrain with foliage and trees, the landscape, and the default sky, fog, and directional light from Unreal Engine. The directional light, combined with the post-processing volume, is used to alter the visual aesthetic and create the desired mood and ambience. Throughout the short video, changes in values for both the actors and other variables, such as saturation, contrast, exposure, and intensity, are animated to visually enhance the transition between the familiar world and the unfamiliar upside-down landscape. The dark, high-contrast red light creates the impression of the sky bleeding and breaking.
In addition to the contrasts of day and night, familiar and unfamiliar, up and down, I was also intrigued by the relationship between positive and negative space. This led me to use the spline technique to define the shape within the landscape, which serves as a closing shot. As the car moves, its destination remains unknown, but it is clearly heading somewhere—somewhere unfamiliar. This inspired the title of the project: Quo Vadis? (Where are you going?). This is the very question I asked myself at the beginning of the project: where am I going with this? And here is where I landed.
Overall, I’m pleased with what I’ve managed to deliver. With respect to the visual end result, I’d like to think of this as a prototype on its way to improving in quality, especially in the realm of animation. However, my primary focus was the experience itself, which has definitely allowed me to become more proficient in Unreal Engine and given me a better understanding of the production pipeline. I plan to make the most of this experience in future projects during Term 2
