Sky Scraper
1940s New York, a blimp, and 30 days to finish it.
I had recently visited New York for the first time, coming from Los Angeles, and one of the things that struck me most about Manhattan was the architecture. I started thinking about what the city must have looked like in the 1930s when those huge structures were going up. That trip led me to research the art deco movement, which became the visual foundation for Sky Scraper. Beyond the setting, I wanted to attempt something I hadn't done in any of my previous work, which was to build a story around two characters who have chemistry. A lot of the cinematic work being made in game engines right now is action-driven, and I was curious whether I could pull off something with romance instead. There's a moment in the short where the two characters embrace, and getting that interaction to read as genuine through MetaHumans turned out to be one of the more challenging and rewarding parts of the project.
I submitted this cinematic to the Virtual Filmmaker Challenge, and it won 3rd out of 250+ submissions. I was honored by the feedback from the judges, whose own work I've followed and admired for a long time. You can check out the full breakdown I made after the competition here.
The most difficult shot was the hug. As the solo creator on this project, I had to mocap both characters myself by propping up a jacket and capturing each side separately, then stitching the two performances together in Unreal. Getting the contact points to align precisely was critical because any offset would cause the meshes to clip and the cloth simulation in Marvelous Designer to break. It took a lot of iteration, but it ultimately turned out well.
Character Animation & Mocap
- All mocap was done with Move.AI (no suit), then cleaned up in Unreal's built-in control rig.
- I used a custom hand pose library I've been building across projects to speed up hand cleanup.
- Body and facial animation plugins: Threepeat Anim Tools and Locodrome.
- I started using indirect manipulation in the control rig on this project, which hides gizmos and lets you rotate joints freely. It made the viewport much cleaner while animating.
Metahumans
- Head sculpts and hi-res face textures came from 3D Scan Store, converted using mesh-to-MetaHuman.
Cloth Simulation
- Same Marvelous Designer pipeline as previous projects: MetaHuman FBX exported from UE, brought into Blender and exported as alembic, simulated in Marvelous Designer, then imported back into UE5.
Virtual Camera
- Live Link with iPhone for handheld camera shake. On this project I refined the approach of keyframing the base dolly and pan first, then recording the handheld movement over it as a separate pass.
Environment
Post Production
- Color grading and final editorial done in DaVinci Resolve.
