Strength to protect what matters

Strength to protect what matters (2023):

Unreal Engine 5.1, After Effects, Adobe Premiere.

This short film I made with Unreal Engine 5 is my final project for the Skyup Academy Masterclass.

The protagonist is a young woman that wanders a dystopic fantasy Japan to protect people from evil. Here evil is represented by a Japanese Oni mask but it's up to the spectator's imagination whether behind the mask there's a real demon or is just an evil man.

The short film is divided in three scenes. I created them in Unreal Engine 5.1 with Quixel Megascans and Sketchfab assets. The style I was looking for was a japanese dystopic fantasy world and that's what I tried to represent with how I arranged the assets. I took inspiration from animation series like Kimetsu no Yaiba and Natsume Yūjinchō, and videogames like SEKIRO: Shadows Die Twice and Genshin Impact's Inazuma region.

There's two characters in the short film. The villain is the ninja model from Mixamo with a oni mask on his face applied in Unreal Engine. The protagonist is my original Metahuman with parts of armor from Sketchfab applied on her. The animations come from Mixamo and Unreal Engine presets.

In the first scene I created the apartment with the modelling tool in Unreal Engine, this way I had more control over the scene and eventual changes of it. Then I proceeded to place the assets in favor of camera.

In the second scene, I modelled the landscape, located the assets, added decals, particles and volumetric fog to create a mystical atmosphere. The protagonist coming from the temple encounters the villain and fights him on the road. The fog on the back of the road is an animated material on a plane in favor of camera. The vegetation come from the "European Hornbeam" pack from Unreal Marketplace.

When I was thinking what to portray in my animation an idea came to my mind and I quickly draw a draft. That draft became the base of the third scene of the short film. The protaganist is proud of her victory but still has a long way to go, as a message that even if you get a small victory in life, you have to persevere to achieve your dreams and protect what matters to you.