Completely Machinima: Interview with film director AlexS189

Damien discusses the creative process used by AlexS189 and his production team in the recent 2021 Cinematic Captures ‘Animated Film’ competition winning film, Fallen Angel: A Star Wars Short (Unreal). The film is reviewed in our January 2022 episode.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Unreal, mocap, started, bit, film, animation, vader, rebels, shot, fallen angel, work, bigger, character, create, tool, called, script, animatic, learn, vega

SPEAKERS

Damien Valentine, AlexS189

Damien Valentine 00:08

Hello, and welcome to another installment of And Now For Something Completely machinima. I am Damien Valentine. And this time I'm going to be joined by Alex, who is the director of the film he recently reviewed Star Wars' Fallen Angel. So please talk about yourself and the film.

AlexS189 00:29

Hi. Yes, I'm I'm Alex, I work on a few Unreal shorts here and here and there, particularly for Star Wars stuff because, well, Star Wars and it is fun. And yeah, so we worked on a short recently called Fallen Angel, which was for a competition that was run by a guy called Cinematic Captures who is another content creator who creates Unreal cinema, Unreal Engine cinematics. So there's a competition he put on. And, yeah, we entered it in the best film category, and creative for that over a couple of months. And we, we have a one best animated film for it. And it was a it was really, it was really cool. Actually, there were a lot of really, really, really good submissions to that competition. It was really good. Yes, that's just kind of what I do. Yeah, it's fun.

Damien Valentine 01:24

That's how we rediscovered your film. Because one of our earlier podcasts last year, we covered the contest because we thought people might want to submit and then of course, when the winners were announced, we saw yours and we liked it. So we reviewed it, and we really impressed by it. Thank you very much. So what inspired the story for the film?

AlexS189 01:50

I can actually send it to you. Let me remind me to send this to you after this. It was actually a bit of artwork that we found, and apologies to the guy who made it. I can't remember your name off the top of my head, but I will send this around. And yeah, it was basically just this still of Vadar stood over have made his grave. And this was before the the it wasn't a comic. But it was before that was released. I think it was a couple of years ago now. And yeah, saw that was just like, I want to create something that will justify remaking this and Unreal. So that's where the first iteration of Fallen Angel came from. And it was the kind of thing that I started a while ago. And it was just kind of put on the back burner just for commitments and stuff. And then when the competition came around, originally, we were going to enter something else. And a friend of mines an animator James he, I asked him, I cheekily asked him if he'd be up for helping out. And I sent him the cut of it. And he was just like, there's not much story here. And you know what, there wasn't much story, it was rubbish. It was really pretty. But there wasn't much substance to it, there was no emotion. So at that point, we just kind of I transferred to him, I've got a silver idea I've been playing around with of Vadar visiting Padma's grave, which I was kind of avoiding doing, because the big thing it needed was basically high quality face animation, to really sell the emotion. And it's really, really difficult to do that when you can't see someone's face, you can do it. It's just really hard. And it's not, it doesn't end up quite as good, in my opinion. So that's kind of why we ended up doing that. So it wasn't originally going to be that for what for when we were going to do it. But yeah, it it was it was way, way better. In the end, I've still not actually finished the other one that we scrapped. I say scrapped, it's been, it's been in the process of being re-done to be a bit better. But I don't know, when I'm gonna do that. I'm quite busy. But

Damien Valentine 04:09

well, that's gonna say, when you do eventually finish it, or we were looking out for it, because we were really impressed by this film. So seeing more of what you can do, and via a good thing. I want the things that you're right. But the is a very emotional story. One of the things that stood out to us was there's not a single word of dialogue in the entire film, and that's to be able to pull that off is also quite a challenge because a lot of times you do need the dialogue. I think this time it works perfectly without it. I think maybe dialogue would have made it less effective.

AlexS189 04:44

May I think for the Yeah, I think maybe it would have I think you can tell you can probably tell most of your story visually and not have to rely on on dialogue unless there's something... Well, there's a lot of times you need dialogue, but it's probably lately, so this probably wasn't one of them. I'm not sure I'm not sure where I'm not sure where I'm going with this, how I knew I was gonna answer this in my head. I was like, okay, and I've totally forgotten. But yeah, this, this just did this just didn't need it. And we were very lucky. In that, we were able to tell it through the expressions, because like I mentioned before, my friend, James was helping me out any actually has a friend who's also an animator who does a lot of face work. And it's just like, Hey, can I bring me on board? I was like, yeah, yes, please, more help is good. Because it was a, you know, to move to a two month turnaround is not a lot of time. So we needed all the help we could get. And, yeah, he just absolutely nailed it. And cool thing about it is, is some of that sometimes isn't really thought about? It might it might be thought about I'm not sure, but what you often see, I think we've a lot of videos is that they'll put on, I've actually got one there, those two kind of motion capture so and then the data they get from that will probably be what they get. It's the same with face animation dual record, like I am right now to a camera, I can record this dialogue. And a lot of the time, not so much in bigger things, but maybe in like hobby projects and stuff, people just learning it, they'll probably just use the raw data. And a lot of the time that isn't quite what you want to be the raw data of a bit of cleanup. But really, where we spent all of our time was on refining the animation so that we could tell the story for a character's actions and their expressions. And yeah, like I said, I'm not, I'm just kind of rambling at this point. But but that's why we could do it without dialogues, because we really put the time into cleaning up all that animation. And from the get go, we have it planned out. Every single shot, almost every single shot, pretty much every shot through the entire thing. All the shots were characters, we had it planned out from the get go, what they were going to be, how long they were going to be. And what we wanted to show with that every shot in that piece has a purpose. Because another thing as well, we had a three minute time limit, which is also not a lot of time. And basically, I take the story and condense it down. And I got it to two minutes, 59 seconds. So I'm happy with

Damien Valentine 08:00

that just didn't get the right length

AlexS189 08:02

just in that. Yeah, we've got it just under because I reduced the shot by half a second here and half a second there. And my mate, Alex had to do a little bit of recompose and just to fix it because he created the score for it as well. But yeah, so that's a big thing that we could do it as well, we had it planned and we knew what we were going to do. So we could really decide when because time management a huge thing as well, we could really decide where we were going to focus our efforts, and where our big emotional beats were. And also, for example, there's that shot with where the rebels first realized who Vader is, you know, with the lightning and the silhouette of Vader. Yeah, that was actually animation wise, a very low effort shot compared to some of the others. But it still had one of the bigger impacts, I think throughout the entire thing. So it's just kind of identifying where we need to put work. And there were a couple of places where we, you know, we cut corners a little bit and use some stock animation that we hadn't made it work on the rig and stuff. I think I answered your question, but if you want to make a shot with that dialogue, plan it, plan, everything

Damien Valentine 09:17

I think you really have to is is such a tricky thing to pull off. And I think you guys succeeded fantastically. So my next question is why did you choose Unreal as your rendering platform?

AlexS189 09:34

Because it's, it's just really, really good. And it's, it's and it's free. You know, which is it's actually nuts how much high quality content that Epic put out for free. You've got on we got Unreal, which is at this point a world probably a world leading toolkit for Uh, like, real time production in general, you know, we've seen probably since the Mandalorian is probably when it started to really take off. But you see in the big push of virtual production and things like that, which is very similar to cinematics is you know, as using the same tool set almost as far as far as I'm aware, but you can, you can take a camera and track it with optical markers, or even HTC Vive, which is similar thing. And you got a camera in 3d space that you can control, which I really want. But I'm too cheap to afford that cinematic camera. And that's why we chose it. It was also something that I've used in the past, doing other hobby projects and stuff. So I was quite familiar with it. And I was working in it already, I was planning on doing my own short films, and stuff. Anyway, I've been commissioned before I've been working on them for a while. So every all everything we needed was mostly already set up. It was just a case of constructing a story in it in quite a condensed timeframe. So we were very lucky in that in most of the stuff we needed to do with regards to prep was was already done. Another reason to use Unreal is now meta human

Damien Valentine 11:23

Of course. Yeah.

AlexS189 11:25

That's free. What is crazy. It just, I don't know. It's just awesome. It's some really, really cool kit. Really cool. But yeah, that's That's it in a nutshell. So for our to use Unity, for example, be a lot more limited just because of well, to our engines out to other game engines. I'm familiar with our lumberyard and CryEngine from years and years ago producing a film called like this from Vega. And, yeah, they're quite different. If I want to do custom stuff with shaders, for example, I need to learn how to code it. And that's just something I just don't know how to do. It's not on my radar for a

Damien Valentine 12:08

bit. That makes sense, you have to use the platform that best suits you and what you've got available to you. But yeah, Unreal is very impressive. We've been covering various films with it. Personally, I feel like yours is the best example we've seen so far of what you can do with the Unreal Engine - we've seen some others, but there's just so much detail, even the raindrops hitting the ground, when they're outside and all the details and everything like that it's so much attention to detail into your film it really shows off the full potential of the engine,

AlexS189 12:46

a man of the foot, it doesn't even come close to the full potential of that engine. It's it's I'm still learning it's nuts. And just on those raindrops as well, to get those done, I literally followed it. And that's another great thing about Unreal is that there is a tutorial for everything. And you just mentioned those raindrops together as working, I follow the tutorial to the letter to get our work. And that was none of that was me. Almost copy pasting and reapplying what I learned somewhere else. So that's an that's another great thing about it is just the size of the because I'd say partially because free is very, very accessible. And from that you get a wide breadth of tutorials for almost anything you need. And there's paid courses as well. And the paid course a lot of the paid courses are really, really good. Yeah, it's just, it's just crazy. I keep saying crazy. I'm sorry,

Damien Valentine 13:46

Oh don't be sorry. I mean, this is really interesting, because I've worked on lots that I was envisioning myself. So I saw your video its made me think, I need to up my game a little bit. And so being able to talk to us actually given me some ideas of things I need to look at myself. So yeah, talk to us about your work process for working on this. But how did you Where did you begin and what stuck out versus all through?

AlexS189 14:15

So it starts so it starts with it like it starts with a script, right? Right. So getting down pen, pens, paper or keyboard to screen and figuring out what you can do. So in this case, it was because it goes based on my artwork. So started off thinking, okay, how am I going to how am I going to justify this? What's the story here? What is the what are the emotional beats that we want to hit? So obviously we want to show Vader sad, but we want to so this is kind of like the xxx we want to play with Vader's light and dark side of it and really contrast the two and, by the end basically want to start off with although it looks like Darth Vader, it's not it's Anniken. Right. So, at the start, we're starting off with Annikin. And we're, by the end of it, we've killed off that look, or we've attempted to kill off that little sliver of Anniken that showing through in this film by the end of it, and that's all and then it's gone. And so that's what the intention was. So it starts off with a script. And that is just describing okay? The sound of the scene, and let's figure out in words what we're going to do. So yes, we basically do the best to do that. So established a story beats anak and gets to Padma Padma's grave. How do we show their respect for that you haven't cleared the leaves off it to keep it tidy, showing a bit respect for. And then he takes an emotional moment. And then about halfway through, he gets disturbed by, we just went with rebels, because as though those were the assets we had, we were to love to use, like Naboo guards or something like that. But unfortunately, time is, was against us, and we just use what we have. And then we get that, then we start to introduce Darth feet while we use the rebels approach in it, to introduce the Darth Vader side of it. And literally show visually, his stuff is changing in motion by having the lighting get darker and stuff and just very bluntly, say, its changing now, here's all the lighting changes and stuff, which Yeah, I was really pleased with, I find that really cool.

Damien Valentine 16:26

You get a feel, you get a real feel for his rage that his private moments been interrupted by these rebels sneaking up behind him. And he's just absolutely furious. Yeah. to intrude.

AlexS189 16:38

And then, and yeah, it was just almost beat for beat like so in the script of just write down, the rebels approach him. And then as the lighting gets darker, they grow concerned and staff a bit confused on what's going on. And then actually had it in the script lightening reveal reveals the outline of the silhouette of Vader, and then they realize who he is, realize they fucked up. And then they start, then they start to back away. And just as to get past the threshold of her, her tomb. Vader holds them in place. Right? So they can't back away. And then through, basically his vengeance, he, he kills him because that's, that's his dark side taken over the anger side taken over. It might not be totally lore accurate to what would happen. But it was just it was for the purposes of telling the story. We we were a bit creatively free, if you like, yeah. And then that's basically it's the original version of the script was a lot more brutal. We had him. So this also ties of it. So the first version of the scripts kind of a blue sky, this is what we want to do if we had no budget kind of, well, if you had no budget considerations, right. So the original version had him killing off the other two rebels as it would otherwise. But then as he's approaching the final rebel, the rebel would take, this isn't the first version, you take one shot, you deflect it back into his knee and knock him down, take another shot deflect back on the other night, and then he's kind of on his knees and stuff. And third one for his shoulder, so you can't fire his weapon anymore. So is there helpless, an invader would basically make him suffer for a bit. And he doesn't just want to kill this guy. He wants to make him suffer like he's suffering right now. And so that's kind of what we went. That's kind of what the original version of it was. And we, you know, we'd have some cool visuals of him like towering over this defenseless soldier and stuff. You know, bringing, just basically trying to visualize Vader as a powerful figure, essentially, I don't know how this would have looked exactly because I never made it. But that's what the intent was. But then as you know, we sat down, well, I sat down with James to figure out the logistics of it. And then we cut it down based on that, because one thing we're both very familiar with is budget in our projects, to figure out where we need to put our time and how long it's going to take. So we were able to kind of have all of it all of it was pretty much the same. Apart from that, that bit, that combat sequence was really trimmed down to essentially just be the rebels are killed, as you saw in the film. And then it's showing the film, he screams at Vader, like the idea being that it's his, I guess, his dark side, if that makes sense. So Vader is not on. Finally, it's just killing his friends to bring the data out in him even though it's not for sensitive, but for the purposes of storytelling, that's what we were going for. And, you know, tries to chew in anger because he doesn't know what you know, he knows he's dead. So you might as well might as well take it out on him. And then yeah, we ended up with what you saw in the film. So that's a long winded way. That's how we scripted it. And then, from that, it's just going through and kind of visualizing it. So we'll create what's called shortlist where you basically go through and kind of picture in your head for when you're reading the script, how it's going to look. And from that you generate a list of shots. And then you just list down like, I don't know. So the opening shot is a big wide of feed on Naboo. We want to establish with. More importantly, we want to establish that so that we don't need text. Because I hate text. And, you know, what are the key apart from the palace? What are the key features of Naboo and things like that. And, but for shortlists, we're just saying wide number. And then, you know, medium wide trader, blah blah blah. And that's, that's what we use as a basis for planning. So we can look at it and we now have a list, we can associate what we need to do. And from there, you produce an animatic, you get a sense of the timings. It's just using text. And if we had time, I would have actually drawn up storyboards as well, just on a bit of paper, just drawing them up. And then we can actually see a visual of how it's gonna look before we do it. Instead, what I did was I went into Unreal Engine, and I just took stills, I had a couple of characters. And I just took stills of where they're going to be to get an idea for the visuals that way, makes way faster. They're enjoying storyboards, and then tell us your animatic. Right? So, so about your first version of it. And that's when you start to really see the visuals start to appear. And then after that you're going into. Quite often, what I do is I actually block out the shot. So the way our workflow worked is, there's kind of two ways you can approach it, you can have, you kind of break it broken down by scenes, you have one long take for each character, right and the whole line up. And then you can cut between cameras and stuff as you want to in Unreal. Because at the time, because we did record mocap for it, we only had the one so and obviously we got multiple characters interacting. So the way you can approach it that way is you recall all your mocap and you trim it down based on the shot. So that's the next thing we did is we worked out, how does it break down by scene. And then within each of those scenes, how does it break down by shot and how we're going to so basically for our mocap is I would record a full take of the mocap for each of those little scenes. So an example being that segment between Yeah, but the segment between the Vader reveal halfway through with the lightning through the window up until they're frozen in place, and they've been knocked to the ground. So just before they get knocked to the ground. So that was all one mark app take for the Rebels. But because it was split up into different shots, we were quite flexible in how we use that data. So although the timing of the actual mocap recording, if you're to use it as one long thing is set, because it's different shots, we can just slide it a little bit and just reuse the same bit twice here or there so very slightly, or skip it altogether. And that lets you get a lot more out of a single take, if you find out that it takes is a bit more work, but you can do it. And so we did that through the whole thing. And what that lets us do is for example, there's that scene where, you know, they just hold the shot where Vader's holding up the rebel by his neck. So that's two characters directly interacting, but I'm only one person recording the mocap. So what I could do is just have Vader like that and just doing some, you know, movement like that is if he's you know, if the rebel struggling and he's reacting. And then I had the rebel just kind of hitting it, punching them in the face or just on giving up and things like that and getting stabbed and that kind of thing. And then we can take those slivers, trim them down based on the shot and what we want in the shot, then throw it in and that's kind of how I planned out before we shoot the mocap what we're going to do, and then when because then we have some things it's like oh, these will be nice to do and we'll record those as well and keep them in the in the bank. We'll also not just record mocap we'll find out where we can cut corners and just get stuff out of a library somewhere for example a walks the walk cycle at the start we just got the out of the library and the shot where the rebel shooting Vader invaders deflecting it that was actually taken from Jedi Fallen Order. And we actually did some hanky over the top for the movements because actually a Vader walk cycle, so he brought the arm off and did that. So it's an example of where we can cut corners and we did the same thing with a face as well. So the faces are recorded based on that that scene length even it was recorded separately though, and then that will all be cleaned up. And then from there it's a case of getting it in the shot. building up the shots. And just what we could do, where we have it set up was James and Jordan would work on the animation side of things. And basically, we go through a phase of prep, where they'd work on it, and export it into Unreal, and it would just slot right into the shot. And then I can see an update there and then hit render, throw it into an edit. And they can see the updates in shot. The only downside is, when I'm doing that, I was also meant to be lighting, so we had to kind of budget it in there a little bit. Because that's another thing as well as I'm actually releasing a tutorial about this today. But self plug

Damien Valentine 25:43

will do it. When this goes out the show notes underneath, we'll put the link to your tutorial underneath as well so people can see it.

AlexS189 25:52

Oh, that'd be great. Thank you. Yeah, so basically, like, what I'll do is I'll light it per shot on a per shot basis. So light if shot 10 lighting shot 20, 30, 40, 50 would all be in like a separate what the what they called levels. So they'd be in a separate one. And then it just splits everything off and makes it super easy to light, say super easy, it's it's still par, but it's easier. And so yeah, I'd be doing all that and buying some VFX packs and stuff. Because it's way easier to use something high quality, someone else made the make my own for a few quid. And that's another good thing about Unreal is the marketplace is amazing. It's really easy to use. Yeah, and it's from there, it's just refining it and nailing it down. And once we're happy with, and we'll tweak the edit of it as well. And once once we're happy with it, oh, that's nothing I didn't mention in the animatic, we actually just grabbed some music from Star Wars that was from the scene Revenge of the Sith. And use that as temp audio, just to kind of get an idea for pacing and stuff. Because you really you really want that in there. Because it does, it does help a lot and help inspire people working on it. And what we did want to happen with the animatic is Alex, who's the composer that worked on it. And a good friend of mine, he, he started working on the music, and then we started getting that in there as well towards the end of it. And literally within the last last week or so that's when it all really started coming together. And it came down right to the wire. And once you're happy with the visuals, and it's just a case of lighting tweaks or small animation fixes. That's where my friend Hybrid, he is an audio designer. And while he was the audio design on this project, and he took the edit and started creating the foley and audio tracks, and then on the last day, I think, yeah, I remember, we had to submit it on there Saturday night. On the Friday night, I finished work and I pulled an all nighter to get it to get it all done that opening shot I made the night before overnight, within a few hours, like fueled on Red Bull. I was just like, right, I got to get this done. It hadn't even started it by that point. Like I did want to record a time lapse for it. But lbs broke. And I was like, right, I'm not bothering with that I need to get this done. Which would have been really cool. Because it did come together really, really well. It started with nothing. And yeah, so you did the final mix on it. And that's when, like, audio gets overlooked a lot for films, I think, you know, part of it, it might just be the artists that work on it, including myself, you know, I'm guilty of it, you don't really think about it. But if you can really spend some good quality time working on the audio, it makes a world of difference. Anyway, that that's basically a process in a nutshell. So as you probably gathered, a lot of time was spent on the prep a lot a lot of time and that, that makes the rest of it that much simpler to do and you can really figure out what you're doing. Yes, that's how we that's how we made it.

Damien Valentine 29:15

Finally, is definitely time well spent. Because otherwise, you can just sit down and throw stuff together. But what you say together may not necessarily be what you really wanted when you had the initial idea for the project. So you mentioned motion capture a few times. What was your setup there? What suit Do you have?

AlexS189 29:33

Um, you know what, I can get it for a minute.

Damien Valentine 29:37

Okay. Sure thing.

AlexS189 29:39

So this is a Ricocco motion capture suit. So it's just, you're seeing like other crazy stuff using it is it's probably the best. The best affordable. I say I say affordable in quotes because it's still expensive compared to the other kit I've got, its like buying another computer

Damien Valentine 30:00

But it's affordable compared to the stuff that cost like half a million dollars that you'd saw. Yeah. Yes,

AlexS189 30:05

exactly. It's very, is very affordable. And the date you get out of it is actually for what it is and how much it costs. It's, it's really, really good. So yeah, we we asked the mocap setup we use for that. And then for capturing face, it was literally camera like this on my phone and video recording, and then using Facewear to do that. And you can you can get Facewear on a monthly license. So, which is about I want to say about 30 quid, I think it were. Yeah, and they had a free trial. So we just use the free trial, because why not? Because, you know, we've wanted to learn it and stuff and test it we'll actually be using, we'll definitely be using Facewear for stuff in the future, because it's really good. It's like, is an industry standard tool. And so yeah, we use that for the face and Maya for processing it all. But yeah, that was our mocap setup. So it was literally a Rococo markup. So in a room not dissimilar for this actually moved house shortly after it was finished. So yeah, it's quite a simple setup, really. And it really is

Damien Valentine 31:18

so impressive that you can basically act out a Star Wars scene in your house. And it's basically work, you pretend to be Star Wars, like, like you would as a kid, but it's work and you can just do it, and then you record it with your suit, and then you get this fantastic result. But at the end when you put it all together in Unreal, and

AlexS189 31:39

I think it's incredible dude, it really is, oh, another thing we have is another part of the market sale. Very important. It's a BB gun stock, right, which we use as a prop for guns. The reason we took the rest of the weapon off is because it's the Rococo suit is sensitive to metal. So plastic and you get there's a bit of weight, it's quite like the stock is quite heavy as well, it's got a counterweight in it. So if you can get like a stick just full of sand, for example, or something like that, or just follow some sort of weight, then you can get that extra performance in there. Because you're actually having to basically the adding in the weight in the animation is done for you. Because you're actually having to work to move it rather than just kind of sense. Like a lightsaber. Yeah, so it's another little part of the mocap setup.

Damien Valentine 32:36

I think that's a really important tip there for anyone watching who wants to get into motion capture is to have the prop related to what your characters meant to be holding. So you can actually have that in the performance.

AlexS189 32:50

Yeah, it's not enough to be you know, bang on me saw out there that that does that doesn't look like at all at all right STG or whatever it's based off of it still hold it in the same way. Yes, as long as it's there for the, it doesn't even have to be exactly the same as for the performance. Because no matter what your unless you've got a scan of yourself and your character in the engine is exactly the same height as you, you're going to deal with scaling issues anyway, when you retarget. So it doesn't need to be bang on it just seems to be good enough for the performance. So for example, if the character is holding like something like a hard drive, then you can get away with just holding your phone and things like that. It's just kind of knowing that halfway there is is good enough. And yeah, you still got you got to put the work in to clean it up anyway. So yeah, so you can save yourself some effort in places.

Damien Valentine 33:47

So what's your process for doing the motion capture cleanup.

AlexS189 33:53

So we will get the data through Rococo. So like that has a solid software for inputting the data and cleaning it up. And then from there, we will export that out into Maya and sub Maya which is just is just an industry standard tool from Autodesk for animation and actually a lot of other things. And quick note on that. It's got a massive price tag to it, but you can get an indie license for like 30 quid a month or something like that. So it's actually considering what it is this also very affordable now. Yeah, cuz I had the same issue. I was like, oh my god, I can't afford Maya for my home PC. Now they do. It's about from three hundred quid a year or something like that. I guess. It's really good for what it is and the amount. It's the full version as well not the LT version because key thing I'm going to mention next is we use a plugin called Red Nine Studio and there's two versions of it. There's a free one and there's a an actual larger things called Pro Pack version, which is paid for - the free version is fine for me because it has all the basic the Pro Pack has all the batch tools in it and all the the bigger workflow tools, whereas the studio version has all the very basic stuff in it. If I can summarize it in a couple of words, so So basically is that it's got a tool in it called an Animation Binder. And for anyone familiar with human ik, is, that's what you'd normally use to retarget animation. So you'd bring in a character with him. Yes, you bring in some mocap data, characterize it, you're using human ik, so map that to another human ik rig. And that works well. There is a tool in there to retarget to a custom rig as well, but it's a bit, I found it very fiddly. What the Red Nine Animation binder does is it make the setup is a bit, it's a bit tricky to get your head around when you first do it because it is a bit complicated and very techy. But once it's set up, it's really really easy to do. So I had my retargets scene setup so that I had a copy of the Recocco skeleton with no animation on it. And then that would human ik to try things. So the way the animation binder works is you have a copy of the skeleton that your animation rig is driving. And that actually drives your animation rig, rather than driving the skeleton. And you can use that to bake the animation on to your rig. Which is really, really handy because you can do custom things like for example, toe roll or ball roll. So you have like you imagine, like, I can't really do much like a full you can select toe lifting things such as eye control much easier. Or, you know, you might have quadrapeds of heads or something crazy like that with like a million legs and you want to mocap crawling on the floor sort of thing. I've not tried it for that, because I've not tried to record my dog, but it would be. But so that's why we had to use, I would literally wanted to set up I drag and drop my mocap into Maya. And it's mapped onto my rig within two clicks. And then from there, it's just animating on a custom rig as you would normally, you know cleaning up market data and that kind of thing. Set and then from there, you just get it into Unreal. It's a bit you know, it's a bit it's a bit more involved in that the things that come up. But that's the gist of it.

Damien Valentine 37:37

That sounds good, though, I'll look into that. Because I use icon for myself for the animation. But we just said about my own sound like intriguing piece of software to try out and have a look at.

AlexS189 37:54

Yeah, it's definitely great for because there are tools for it and unreal, like they've you know, started introducing control work and things like that. I've not really had not really put aside much time to use it. But I have used it for the face and it feels a bit like compared to using Maya I think Maya feels a bit still a bit more mature. Compared to it. Like it feels like a more refined tool to use. Like compared to doing it in Unreal, but you know, it's whatever, whatever works for you at the end of the day is really what's you know, works for you, then that's what's best for you, in my opinion, but

Damien Valentine 38:32

Well, I think now listeners will be very interested in having another piece of software that they can look at and knowing that it's actually now quite affordable for people to try out just to learn and experiment with. Because they said Maya was extremely expensive. Whenever it was and it was off putting people who just want to learn and have some fun, and maybe, maybe what they would take do a short story or something, but they're doing it on their own budget at home as a hobby or whatever. You can't spend 1000s of year software, which you're not even sure you're gonna like

AlexS189 39:13

Yes. So it's already an expensive, expensive hobby to begin with. So yeah, yeah, they had an hour on it. It's not it's not very good.

Damien Valentine 39:24

So what advice would you give for people wanting to learn to get started with Unreal? What sort of resources should they look out for?

AlexS189 39:32

Um, so, the first the first thing I'd say is figure out if there's something you have in mind to make. Go with that figure out how to make that. So to and then from there what I would, what I would do as a starting point is I would do we're not going to plus I haven't I haven't got one myself. So don't worry What I would try and find is a decent getting started in Unreal generally, right? So there's loads of websites out there. For example, years and years ago, I used digital tutors, which is now measure Pluralsight. And there's also Skillshare, and Lynda YouTube Artstation Learning is also really good now, or it's probably always been really good. I've just never really used it until recently. And just find something that's good for a getting started thing that covers everything quite generally. And then that'll give you a basic understanding of what you're doing. And then if it's something specific you want to create, I guess what you can start doing there is just figure out what that takes. So for example, if you want to create a, in fact, for the easiest way to show you how I started learning how to use game engines in general, so I started on CryEngine years and years ago, I did use Unreal for a bit and I hadn't touched it for a while, but I seriously started doing stuff in game engines in CryEngine. And I started off creating a, like just a custom environment, which was like a spaceship hangar, very small spaceship hangar. And that was just kind of my way of learning CryEngine. And then I built up made a bigger one and kind of kitbash it together and made a slightly bigger cinematic with a camera flying around and some characters doing some things. And I just gradually gradually kind of built up the project I was working on. So you could do something like that as well, we just want to make one thing that small and simple to get you started. And then I guess just gradually build up to something bigger, something that you really have in mind that you want to do, which is what I what I did, that's just what I did when I first started doing it. And then the idea I originally wanted to do I didn't do I ended up doing Letters from Vega. But that was way cooler anyway, so that's fine. But as I said, and there's loads of courses on there. So just like I said, just start off on a get started one that covers a bit of everything to get you an understanding of what everything does. And like you know, kind of a top level. And then you'll be able to find things that are more specific to what you want to do. So cinematics and you want to create your own things from start to finish, then you'll want to learn about you want to learn about sequencer and how to create your own environments and how how that works. You know how all that stuff works as well, maybe a little bit of VFX little bit, a little bit of lighting stuff as well. And some rendering features as well will be really good. If there's a channel called William Faucher. Who his his his stuff is really, really good, he does tutorials for Unreal, a lot of it's centered around rendering from what I seen. So that's really good for the render inside of it as well. When you come to do that's what I used to learn, learn how to render my stuff. And the results were really really good. Yeah, that's, that's, that's kind of out. So in In summary, go for getting started guide. And just work work through that. So it covers a bit of everything. And then if there's something you're specifically interested in, you can find a course or a video on it and just soak up as much input as you can and make your own stuff, start small. And then gradually work your way up and try and like don't worry about the quality of it. Just get it just get it done and anything you learn, apply it to the next one. And then keep going and there's multitudes of discord servers as Unreal slackers. And if you can think of a creator for cinematics, there's probably a Discord server that they have as well. And they're full of people that will help you out as well. So don't be afraid to ask for help. as well. I'm going to give you a lot of editing work to do to make this very concise.

Damien Valentine 44:15

It'll be helpful the real work is going to be I'm going to track down these resources and again links in the show notes so anyone who wants to explore these can easily just click and find all these things. Yeah,

AlexS189 44:26

if you want to hand that by the way just if you want to find stuff just let me know and I can send you some things

Damien Valentine 44:31

please do Yeah, cuz you know all these resources so yeah, just

AlexS189 44:35

in Yeah, yet. Just give me a lesson I'll be fine. Okay, so that's another thing just, you know, don't be afraid to ask for help. There's people, the discord servers full of people that are just like you that are doing this as a hobby. Find in kind of learning how to do it themselves and fail have come across the same problems you're coming across. And if you ask them for help, they will help you because chances are in the past, they've asked someone for help, and they help them. And you end up with just these little, these little communities everywhere where people are just helping each other. And it's really cool. Really, really cool to see. Yeah, so as I say, get started. I think

Damien Valentine 45:20

it's good. Yeah, encouraging people to learn and develop the skills is something we're we feel very strongly about. So it's nice to know the communities out there, that we're all about that and helping each other, overcome the problems. Whatever platform they're using. And yeah, we like it. So you mentioned a few times film called

AlexS189 45:47

Oh my god.

Damien Valentine 45:50

I'm a terrible joke the Battlestar Galactica film, Letters from Vega?

AlexS189 45:55

Oh, Letters from Vega.

Damien Valentine 45:57

That's, that's it. I'm so sorry. All right. I was thinking about these tutorials, and the name just went out there. So let's see, maybe you've mentioned this before I looked at it. And this is a film that's made with the Star Citizen. And this is we've been looking at Star Citizens videos for a while now we're really excited as a way to create machinima as well, because it's a big open world. And there's a lot of places to go to, and some of the cinematic tools in it like the way you can, the voice chat in the built in the game where you can talk and it makes the character's face move.

AlexS189 46:31

Yeah, that's cool, isn't it? Yeah.

Damien Valentine 46:35

So none of us have actually tried. I mean, I back the game when it was kick started funding, I haven't actually tried it as a way to make machinima. I haven't actually tried it recently, because I'm waiting for more things to come out. But we're really excited as this platform. So you're the first person who succeeds actually made something with it. So what was that like as a as a creator to make those videos,

AlexS189 47:01

it's very similar to what I'm doing now was very similar to what I'm doing now. way basically. So there are like, so for example, in one day, now, all the assets I have are extracted from Battlefront. And at the time, when I did it, the word tools to get the assets out of Star Citizen at the time, and convert them and work with them and things. Yeah, it was just, it was pretty, it was pretty much the same. So that was all built in CryEngine at the time. And with working from it, it was basically it was very similar to Unreal in how we approached it and how we used it. We didn't do any mocap for it. We use canned animations, because I didn't have to do mocap at the time. And yeah, it was, it was pretty, it was pretty much the same. So that was actually my I think Letters from Vega was my big project that I was building up to when I was first learning how to do this. So I mentioned it before, start with something small and build up my journey was start with something small, make a little little hanger with a little Gladius in it. Start with something bigger. I rip off Battlestar Galactica and build a bigger hangar with more Gladius Gladii I in it. And then I think it was after that I wrote the script for Letters from Vega same process, as described earlier for fallen angel, and got in touch with my friend Sean. To help to help out of it. And yeah, just kind of, we built it from there. It took us about a year to make. But yeah, it was, it was it was the same process, it was just a bigger project. Because obviously the scope for it instead of three minutes, it was 16. It had space battles. And I said I have hints space battles. They have battles on the ground, we're trying to make like a big airfield feel alive and that kind of thing. See, I think overall, it's like actually working with it. Workflow wise, was very similar to what we do here. But what we did on Fallen Angel,

Damien Valentine 49:18

good to know that your experience with that helps with Fallen Angel.

AlexS189 49:22

Yeah, it's just the it's just the mindset of it. Where hide hide approach is very similar. It's just a different just different tools and slightly different ways of working with them. But yes, it's quite similar.

Damien Valentine 49:37

Okay. So obviously, we really enjoyed Fallen Angel and one of the questions I think we all like to know is, are you working on something new? What's your next project and then can you talk about that yet? Or is it just a sort of, we have to wait and see.

AlexS189 49:54

So I mentioned that I did have another project that was scrapped before Fallen Angel, so I've been working on that on and off and yeah, so I've been working on that on and off and worked on it when I can. But you know, with the holidays and stuff I've just been with family and doing all that stuff. So that's kind of on there. But it's one of those where I'm not that. To be honest, I'm not that inspired to get it done. Because a friend of mine recently reached out with a pitch for something else that he really wants to do. And I actually, that's really cool. So we're in the pre production for that.

Damien Valentine 50:31

Okay, so obviously, you can't talk about that just yet.

AlexS189 50:33

I can't talk about that just yet. It's super, if I told you, I'd have to kill you.

Damien Valentine 50:38

Okay, what we have to do then is just keep an eye on your YouTube channel. And then imagine when you're ready to reveal that project that you'll find Yeah,

AlexS189 50:47

it will be a little while a little while away yet. But it will, it will be there. But what I am doing in the meantime, is actually creating tutorials for how I made Fallen Angel. So I'm basically taking little snippets from that of my workflow. And basically, as I'm doing now, just had to talk to camera piece talking about what it is and the mentality behind it. And then just showing you how I did it and stuff and really trying to make them high quality as well. Really putting in the time to edit them down and things like that, to really, there's a tool for you. Actually, I didn't mention it before DaVinci Resolve. Okay, get that if you want a decent video editor is free. And it's fantastic. It's better, it's better than Premiere my opinion. And I've used both.

Damien Valentine 51:39

I will link that in the show notes as well as a free video. So for people to use.

AlexS189 51:44

Yeah. Yes, that's what I'm working on the moment. And then we'll be stuff, probably after that, but I don't know. But basically, that that takes priority over everything else, obviously. So yeah, some stuff can naturally take a while to do. But I'm always I'm always there on Discord to help folks out if they ask for it.

Damien Valentine 52:06

That's good to know. And hopefully, you'll get some people coming to see how do I do this? And you can help them out. Yeah, man. That'd be good. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time. This went on a lot longer than I thought it was going to.

AlexS189 52:20

Yeah, it was. It was it was a good time. Yeah.

Damien Valentine 52:23

So thank you so much for joining me here today. All the films and tours and things we've talked about. You'll find you'll find those in the show notes. So see you next time. Bye, guys. Happy New Year. Happy New Year.