Flicker - Behind The Scenes

Hi! It’s been a long time.

I’ve been gone from social media for a while. Like many of you I have my main job which for me is working on Lonn a VR game and while doing that I have my own personal little creative projects on the side. However, for a long time I’ve been in the cycle of getting stuck in various projects.

Well I’m happy to say that I worked on a short film called Flicker which is on YouTube right now! It feels really great to have completed a personal creative project.

Most of the time ideas find you

I had no idea that I was going to make a short film. It all started when I was experimenting with an environment idea I had. Then I was checking out some short films and animated clips on YouTube/Twitter. I thought this looks fun and that was kind of it, no big ambitious plans or massive ideas. Just a very simple idea. A robot finds a drone and brings it back, then the door that the robot has always wanted to get through is opened and their journey continues. 

Creative Constraints - A great tool in completing a project

I limited myself to only using the environment which I made using Quixel and Unreal marketplace Assets. I also used two characters from the Unreal marketplace which are the Robot and the Drone. I then did three days of filming spread over two weekends. A few hours each day. 

Initially I created the environment over a weekend spending a few hours. For the shots themselves a combination of work was required. The animation, blueprints to allow movement between locations, keyframing animation in the sequencer, visual effects work, lighting, materials and more. 

My approach was to scout the environment I had and set up specific parts for key shots as I made a rule to not create more locations for this short film. Once I would find a location I may have added a few more props, some lighting and particles. After that I put the actors into the scene and using a blueprint I created assigned animations to the Robot for that scene. Then I’d set up the camera, save the sequence and I’d have a few seconds of a shot complete. 

I want to point out a few things with the environment as well. Quixel is an amazing tool to speed up environment progress. I want to make a video one day going more in-depth with this topic but I highly recommend trying out Quixel Bridge, it may just change the way you create your Unreal Engine Projects/Games. I believe it gives developers tools to create worlds that just weren’t available to them before without purchasing many marketplace assets or trying to create them by yourself.

When it makes sense, create tools to assist in the production

For the Robot I created a blueprint that gave me control over Still Animations and Dynamic Animations. Combined with the ability for the speed of animations, choosing a spline path to follow, looping animations, delays between animations and more properties. This allowed me to quickly place the Robot, draw a path with a spline, assign a run animation and test the shot. Same for more still shots like the shot of the Robot waking up or going down to pick up the Drone, I had a lot of control so it pays off to do a little bit of work making a blueprint/tool that can be re-used to speed up the production. 

You may have noticed the Robot had a few animations. I had a limit to use the animations and only allow tweaks for keyframes. So I could duplicate an animation and modify it but I really wanted to try to be creative with the world, props and camera while using a specific set of animations. This greatly sped up the production. With the Drone I keyframed the movement since it does not require complex animation as it does not have a humanoid style rig and the nature of a Drones movement is quite simple at least in the style I was going for.

If you want to try to follow this approach but with your own library of animations consider if you have a humanoid character to use motion capture then modify the animations. Especially if the focus is more on the creative aspect of developing a short film rather than the specific technical aspects of character animation. It all depends on your goal, my goal was to create a short film and tell a story but also to have fun on a creative project. 

After each day of filming I put the shots together in Davinci which is the program I use for video editing now. It was really easy to cut parts out, and stitch them together. 

Before I knew it I had all the shots I wanted, put some music in and was really happy with it! It did everything I wanted to do.

Try not to chase perfection 

I could have been a perfectionist and decided to go much further but that’s the thing. I created something that I’m happy with and that was the goal. I’m not trying to win an award with this, I created this for myself and decided to put it on YouTube to share with people.

I think it’s valuable to truly understand why you are creating a specific thing and then never forget that. So many projects I over complicated or burnt out on in the past were not meant to be commercial products or something to impress somebody. They were meant for me to express my creativity, to have fun with. 

Final Touches

Once I had the film completed I reached out to my friend Ray who had a track that I thought fitted the film quite well. We had a chat and he was on board for me using it in the film. Having the right music really adds a lot in any project, it’s a night and day difference watching it with the music and without. If you want to know more about Ray click here.
I chose to only use a backing track and not use sound effects. Part of this was me wanting to produce this short film in a small amount of time, the other is that it felt like it wasn’t missing anything without them as it’s really about the visual story and the music.

The Anxiety Of Creative Work

In general I suffer quite a lot of anxiety. However it is amplified by 100 when it comes to my creative projects and sharing them online. This is why you don’t see a lot of projects I’ve worked on or certain video series of mine stopping all together. I believe a way to help with this is to have positive encouragement from people around you. Showing your work to others can reduce anxiety and help keep you positive about your project allowing you to continue with creation. I have found working in isolation to be a downfall of my projects, keeping the problems to myself and giving up on my project and in the process of that myself. If you’re lucky enough to know one or two people who can encourage you during your creative endeavours, share your work with them no matter how far along you are in the process. I was lucky to have my wife and my friend Ray.

In the future I hope to be able to share in-progress parts of my projects on Twitter and on this blog. Hopefully this can be another way to manage my anxiety by posting small updates.

Thank you for reading

Well with that I hope these thoughts on the project were somewhat valuable or interesting. I hope you are doing well in these times and are enjoying working on your own creative projects. 

I’ll catch you next time.