Delighted to present a new realtime animated short I’ve made over last 2-3 weeks - BLACKSEAM. It’s also ‘pitchvis’, essentially, for the TV show concept I’ve been writing and developing recently - a strike-era Yorkshire mining drama. Whilst fictional, some elements are inspired by anecdotes from my Dad and other miners from my hometown of Featherstone.
I gave myself a hard deadline of today, because we’re going on a well-earned holiday tomorrow, and also because it’s one year to the day since I first started using Unreal Engine! Of course there’s more I wish I’d had time to do and plenty more polish and detail I could add, but that’s life innit.
Featherstone author and TV personality Ian Clayton was generous with his time in recording the voice-over for me, and did a great job parsing my script and adding the authenticity that I really wanted - and we got to go for a pint in Fev after. Mike Payne lent me his time processing the audio I recorded.
For the tech-curious, this was created in Unreal Engine, as all my work is now, with Autodesk Maya as my main DCC. My workstation is Windows 10, with an RTX 2070 GPU. The background and previs characters are from Mixamo, with Epic Metahumans taking their place for hero characters once previs was complete. Along with stock mocap, I used my first-generation Perception Neuron mocap suit along with MocapX on the iPhone to record facial animation separately (not ideal). I pass all my mocap through Maya for processing and editing before it goes into Unreal. I edited the film in Adobe Premiere, and recorded Ian’s VO in Adobe Audition. The script was written in Highland 2, as are all my scripts.
Music and audio are from Storyblocks, and I used the Quixel Megascans library and the Unreal Marketplace to acquire digital assets to put the world together.
Timeline-wise, I started prep work on this 3 weeks ago, in the mornings before my regular work. That was mostly rigging the Dosco Roadheader machine (so it could scoop simulated coal in realtime), building the coal mine world and setting up the coal simulations. After my last previs project wrapped two weeks ago, I went up north and recorded Ian, and the following Monday (just last Monday!) the work on shots began. The speed at which it’s possible to put these things together in Unreal is mind-blowing.
Right, I’m off to the seaside for a week.