Short films and other video content created by the FilmDaft staff writers, including production diaries from new projects.
So I thought it was time for a quick update on the Unreal Engine 5 short film project. I’m still testing out city designs and building different scenes. I’ve created a more gritty look for the city, which I like. As I wrote in my last post, I found my initial design too pretty. I …
As I mentioned in part III of this diary, I’ve been working on different city designs to see what I like and don’t like. So I want to share one of my ideas and what I like (and don’t like) about it. Here’s a quick animated fly-over of the design. The idea behind the design …
I think it’s time for a status update on the FilmDaft cyberpunk animated short film I’m working on in Unreal Engine 5. Read Part I here. I’ve been working on three things: finishing the screenplay, creating characters (and starting animating them), and building the scenes (and testing city designs) for the movie. In this article, …
I’ve begun to understand how to create a cyberpunk city in Unreal Engine 5. But even though the city itself is a very important element in neo-noir and cyberpunk films, without characters in it to bring it to life, it is just dead and empty streets. So I created a small test scene to take …
The lines between the tools used in the gaming industry and the film industry are getting blurrier each year. Not at least thanks to Unreal Engine, which is now being used on hit shows like The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi. For those unfamiliar, Unreal Engine (UE) is, in essence, a gaming engine created for making …
About a year ago, I finished my first short film called VECT0R. And I didn’t really know what to do with it. You can watch it here: As old readers might recall, I started this crazy short-film project because I wanted to try out some stuff in After Effects. I’ve covered the whole process here …
Top photo credit: Sofa T As I was doing the final edit to my short film VECTØR, I was thinking a lot about the next stage, i.e. sound design. I had already licensed a couple of tracks that I liked that I felt worked very well within the context, but I still felt it needed …
My short film project is coming closer to an end. So close in fact that I was able to make a trailer (or teaser?) for the film. In the last minute, I decided to change the title to VECT0R. I still need to do the final tweaks to the music and sound before releasing the …
For one of the scenes of my first short film “The Journey”, I wanted to create a dreamlike science lab. And I decided to create the laboratory in our living room. The reason for this was, first of all, that we didn’t really have the time to find a real lab. Second, I wanted to …
Wow! The day finally arrived. Yesterday evening I finished shooting the last scene for my short film. I thought the day would never come. If you remember Part 2: The Nuked Drive-In of my amateurish endeavors into the film world, my protagonist is walking through the fallout of an old drive-in movie theatre where she …