Lamentation - Cinematic Short Film

We’re joined by George Kee as we discuss the ins and outs of creating a cinematic short film in Unreal Engine. George breaks down the process of creating his incredibly moving short film, Lamentation, a metaphorical representation of his journey with grief following the loss of his father. We dive into topics such as hero asset creation, storytelling, composition, lighting and colour grading and how to use those elements to convey emotion.

Intro

Hello everyone, my name is George Kee, I am a 3D Artist originally from Hastings, a town in East Sussex. I began creating 3D art around 6 years ago when I started studying Game Art and Design at college for two years and then at university in Norwich for three years. In 2021, I took a sandwich year out of university to gain some experience in the game industry, having great fun working in Liverpool for a year at Lucid Games Ltd. I was lucky to be an Environment Artist working on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.

I am now trying my hand in the film industry, working at Freefolk (a VFX post-production studio) as an Asset Artist in their Film and Episodic Department. I have also been fortunate enough to be awarded Runner Up for Rookie of the Year: 3D Animation and Highly Commended for Film of the Year: 3D Animation in the most recent Rookies 2023 Awards for my short film, which I will be breaking down in this article!

Story

This film was completed for my final project in university and is very personal to me being about the loss of my father seven years ago. I selected this subject matter for two reasons, firstly I wanted to make the most of a 6-month project, to create a piece that meant something to me and that I could evoke emotion within the viewer. Secondly, I wanted to portray my experience more symbolically and metaphorically, without using characters or dialogue, just simple assets in a simple environment, so that the viewer can understand and imprint their own personal meaning to this film. The concept of the film is based around my dad owning a pair of gold crocs, which he would wear everywhere (to go to the shops, take the bins out, to cut the grass etc.). The film follows the daily use of these crocs over multiple years, including the day of his passing, the crocs being packed away, and house emptied after he passed. There is a very emotive segment of the film where the house is no longer in use, until the day that my mum, brother and I moved back into the house a year later, cleaning it up and now utilising these gold crocs once again. The film ends on a projection for the future, where these crocs are now mine, and revealed are some baby gold crocs, which would be my child. These crocs are a representation of my happiness and correlate with my steady journey to acceptance.

There are also other themes of grief and ‘passing on’ threaded throughout the film. For example, there is foreshadowing in the first shot featuring a stone with a hole through next to a picture of my dad, my brother and I, and another shot after his passing where the stone has fallen to the floor after the paramedics had knocked it off and left. The stone with a hole in it is a symbolism of leaving, there is an expression in my hometown that goes, “you can't leave Hastings without a stone with a hole in it”. The stone symbolises my dad had left the house physically and he spiritually left this world.

Crocs

The Crocs are the hero asset for this film therefore needed a lot of attention, this was a great way to further push my modeling and texturing skills to transition from games to film. I started as I would with any model, which is finding reference, or in this case taking reference images. Orthographic views help the most with modelling to use in Maya, and then using alternative angles and close ups for texturing later. I worked using a sub-division workflow in Maya for this asset, the most challenging part was balancing the shape I wanted with cleaning up the geometry as I modeled, it proved very difficult to avoid shading issues. This also helps to model this way in preparation for baking, however in this case I used more of a mid to high-poly and did not need to bake as I wanted the geometry to hold up well in the close-ups.

Texturing is my favourite process of the asset pipeline. There is something so satisfying for me to build up a material and achieve as close to reality and the reference as I can, like a big game of spot the difference, ha-ha. It was important to take my time and study these crocs, I not only had the reference images, but I had the real crocs on my desk for the most part of the project, which is the most useful resource when texturing from reference. Developing my eye has to be one of the biggest skills that has affected my work the most, the ability to see what is wrong and having the knowledge to change it to look correct, is an active and growing process which I hope never stops furthering.

I think the key to some of my success in texturing would be to keep adding subtle layers of detail, starting from more obvious bigger shapes, down to the smallest micro-details. Utilise as many tools as possible within a software, also finding abstract ways of using the tools provided for unique effects and results, e.g. in Substance Painter I layered masks with filters, inside folders with inverted masks, layered generators, utilising anchor points etc. to keep building the texture and achieve the look you are after. You can have complete control over your texturing with all these tools at your disposal.

Path Tracer

One of the main differences between path tracer and lumen is how much the path tracer affects bounce lighting, as it uses ray tracing, there are settings to change how many times a light bounces from a direct light source, the more bounces, the brighter the indirect lighting. Indirect lighting and global illumination cause light to not only bounce but also reflect a surface colour, which is one of the biggest helping factors in lighting for realism. When I would switch back and forth between Default Lit and Path Tracer, the Default Lit is usually significantly darker due to the lack of light bounce calculations, so I would have to frequently check my lighting back and forth between the two. I very much recommend using the resources out there on Unreal Engine, such as William Faucher’s videos on almost anything, his tutorials on lighting, camera effects and rendering became very useful when it came to rendering and setting up the ACES colour space conversions for colour grading.

Post Production

Colour grading and post effects are some of the most crucial edits to my projects, it executes the final vision, taking the raw renders from the 3D packages and giving them the mood and feel that I envisioned. I used Davinci Resolve for my grading, an awesome (and free) package for editing which also has such an extensive colour grading editor. There are plenty of great nodes to use within Davinci, it lends itself to integrating plugins that people create, giving me complete artistic freedom to achieve the look I want, such as grain and film LUTs to emulate old camera effects. After finishing the film, I made a short breakdown for some of the shots, so that people can see every layer of detail that I put in, including modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering and colour grading. It is very easy to glance over an artist’s work and not realise how much careful consideration and time goes into making the final product that we see, I would really recommend showing breakdowns, especially for job hunting purposes and skill sharing.

Conveying Emotion

I really wanted to show the passing of time in this film, to see the crocs from brand new to current day, to see the hallway changing in the background with every shot, at different times of day and interior lighting setups. This gave the simple hallway a lot of dynamic changes, it completely changed the mood just with the use of light and colour, as the low angle composition is the same in most shots. Generally warmer shots are happier, and colder are associated with sadness, so it is very easy to signify simple feelings, however I also tried to represent some more unobvious in-between feelings, such as using a greener hue for more subtle feelings, such as despair, or muted colours for when the mood of the shot is a typical day. So much can be done with lighting and colour, it was great to experiment with so many scenarios to capture the emotions I was aiming for.

Likewise, composition and set dressing are equally important in portraying a mood and storytelling. I mostly stuck to core compositional rules, such as the rule of thirds and leading lines. Just a few tweaks to the way an environment is displayed can guide the viewer's eyes subtly to where you want them to look, as well as create interesting artistic compositions. An example of a compositional change which affected the mood was the moment the paramedics left, and the sirens are still going off. I made the crocs more scattered like in a panic; a simple change adds so much to the intensity of this scene.

Composition

There are a lot of closeups that I would like to break down, however if I had to choose one it would be the stone shot. The composition is simple, breaking it up into thirds and using a golden section as a focal point. Our eye is naturally drawn towards the brighter points in a shot which in this case I have made the hole in the stone the brightest with a light behind it. It is important to have focal points and areas of rest with little detail so that the eye can circle back around to the focal points in the shot. I have three focal points, the first being the stone, secondly the car in the background and finally the carpet. Having these three points positioned in an evenly spaced-out triangle formation allows for the eye to go back around the cycle and continue to take in the details.

Colour Palette and Lighting

The colour palette I chose for this shot was colder than most of the shots as this is a pivotal and devastating moment in the film. As you can see in the process video, there is a lot of difference in mood between the raw export from Unreal Engine, and the colour grading and filmic effects I added in post-production. The camera used is a 50mm camera, as this is roughly how the human eye sees the world and great to use for close ups, I would recommend a 50-85mm camera for all your closeups It brings the background forward and can have more of an intense depth of field, which helps with focusing on a hero asset.

For lighting, this shot is back lit, which allows for rim lighting, creating a silhouette around the focal point of the shot. I added in extra rim lights to accentuate the forms of the stone, and a subtle front light which acts as a fill light so that the front of the stone’s details can be seen. The streetlamp in the background which is lighting this scene and casting a long shadow onto the stone is also illuminating the car in the background so it can be a secondary or tertiary focal point.

I kept my post process effects very simple, so that I could replicate the nodes onto every shot for continuity and having a thematic colour palette throughout. I first would do a levels to see my values better, then a contrast, then a temperature shift, then adding in grain, and lastly a film emulator, in this film I used the KODAK VISION3 200T for daytime renders and KODAK VISION3 500T for night time renders, to give it that extra filmic and nostalgic look in the colours and grain.

Megascans

I used some Megascans assets and materials, also some scanned assets from online resources such as TurboSquid, CGTrader and Free3D, which have some awesome resources that artists upload for free use. These resources gave me the freedom to focus solely on set dressing, which was another goal for this project, to focus on building the environment to my vision and storytelling through the shots I create using lighting and cinematography. These assets can integrate seamlessly with my assets as I am aiming for photorealism in my modeling and texturing, which was relieving when the scanned models were placed next to mine and there wasn’t too much dissimilarity that would have broken the illusion of photorealism.

Growth As An Artist

Something that I have mentioned before, which I will repeat again as it is very important for my growth as an artist, is my eye. My taste in what I find interesting, inspiring and works to aspire to achieve is always changing and growing. I think when I began my art journey, the bar was only as high as I have witnessed in my own work and some work that I had seen online, now that I have encountered many great artists over the years and seen some of the best work around the world through platforms like ArtStation, this inspires me to want to improve and also shows me the areas in my work that need improving. There is a healthy balance to be found in that though, you don’t want to compare yourself to every other artist, more so looking at your art objectively (which can be tricky ha-ha) and seeing where your work doesn’t quite meet the standard of what you class as good work. The more you indulge in your discipline, the more obvious it becomes in what needs improving and how to get there.

I often go to the same couple of people I trust for feedback over the years, one being a close friend of mine whose work and eye I believe is phenomenal, and the other is an old colleague of mine who also produces beautiful and meaningful pieces. Both people give honest and constructive feedback, both having very critical eyes for all things art. I was also advised by my old colleague that I should create mini versions of those people I seek feedback from in my head, e.g. ‘What would Ray say about the lighting?’, ‘what would Ollie say about the composition?’ This allows me to have an inner dialogue to really be objective and external to my own work, which in turn is a great exercise to develop my own eye.

Additional Advice

Some last recap tips I would like to leave for anyone reading would be to develop your eye by immersing yourself in art you aspire to create and ask yourself the questions: ‘what are the differences between my work and where I want to be?’ and secondly ‘what can I do to get there?’. I would also say to be open to criticism, nothing should be taken personal, and it is a strong skill to be responsive to feedback, if you have a justification for an artistic decision then state why you did it that way (as sometimes artistic decisions can be very subjective). Don’t be too hard on yourself if you are not where you want to be right now, it takes so much time to grow. After only six years I still have so much to learn and so much room to grow as an artist, as does every other artist (that should be more of an exciting thought than a daunting one)!

Outro

Thank you for reading if you have got this far, and a huge thank you to Experience Points for the opportunity to breakdown my film. I hope there would be something in there that an aspiring artist can take from!

If you are interested in seeing more of my art, have any questions or just want to chat, feel free to contact me on any of the below!

ArtStation

LinkedIn

Instagram

georgekee3d@gmail.com