Unreal Filmmaking: Anatomy of a Single Shot

This is the first diary entry on production for Project Rogue (you can read the second here, and about pre-production here and here) and will focus on virtual cinematography inside Unreal Engine 5. Note that the visible dithering in images below comes from GIF compression, not the real-time renderer.

One of my favorite things about animating inside Unreal is how much it feels like working on a real film set. In pre-production you build an environment and most of the assets you will need. Once production starts you are free to fly around that environment and ‘find’ your shots — very much like location scouting in a live action film. You can then construct all the other elements of your shot — blocking, framing, motion, lighting etc. — and given how fast it renders (literally in real-time) if it turns out sucking, you can start over again very easily.

Part of the final shot with all gizmos turned on in the Unreal viewport — each shot has its own camera in permanent placement and you can see many of them in this frame.

So lets take a single shot from Rogue Squadron and see how this works — this was actually the very last shot in the short, #62 of 62. I knew I wanted it to end on a silhouetted X-Wing, wings fully flared against the red planet, with a foreground of the hangar. The original Top Gun opening sequence has an ultrawide shot of an F-14 lining up for landing on the carrier deck, but by this point in production I was having too much fun finding my own angles and shots to worry about replicating the originals. This is about 03:50 mins in, and the soundtrack is deep into a signature ‘Danger Zone’ guitar riff, so the pace is fast, and some movement in the shot was likely necessary too.

As with most shots I just started by flying around the hangar, looking for angles I hadn’t already used and neat ways of framing the X-Wing that would be the focus of the shot. Eventually I realized that I could start with a rather different angle and then move into the framing that I wanted for the end of the shot.

I started messing with an X-Wing orienting itself to exit the hangar, and then flying out as its wings flare (I know, the open wing is an attack configuration, but whatever — this is Hollywood.) This was also a nice mirror to the first shot, which has an X-Wing doing the same thing, but fast from the right and below, instead of slow from the left and above. I tried a couple of different lenses and eventually settled on a 30mm given it’s a reasonably wide shot (wide is relative when you’re in outer space.)

Setting up basic movement of the X-Wing that would be the focal point of the shot.

Early versions of the shot had the camera just move in a diagonal line from high to low, but that felt unmotivated and disconnected from the X-Wing’s motion, so I had the camera change direction at the same time the X-Wing did — moving vertically down as the subject rotated and then horizontally to the right as the subject flew out towards the hangar door. This also allowed more visibility of the second X-Wing in the foreground, which was cool, and the happy accident of the camera flying behind some large pieces of machinery, which darken the frame a couple of times before the cut to black and the credits.

The new camera path for the shot — two different directional moves, coordinated with the movement of the focal X-Wing — almost like a cut, but without a cut.

I did a quick render of the shot and mostly liked it a lot. The eyes being focused on the X-Wing in center frame meant you were looking at the correct part of the frame for the cut to credit, which worked nicely. The crane in the frame at the start of the shot worked well too, giving it a sense of depth throughout. But when placed in the full timeline there was something weird about the cut to black from a complex frame and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

With the basic movement of the shot done, I could switch to secondary elements — like crew members working on the engines and walking around inspecting it, moving slowly, but in the same direction as the camera. I had the wings on the main X-Wing flare and found a nice final frame, positioning the giant red planet (see, just like a real film set!) correctly. I also added a little subtle weight and wiggle to the movement of the X-Wing so the change of motion from rotation to horizontal translation felt more natural.

Secondary elements like animated crewmembers in the foreground, and the wings flaring.

For most shots, the final cleanup involves me going through a standard checklist:

• Sound match: I mostly match the cutting rhythm of the original throughout, and try to match the action to the audio — so the hiss of steam, the whirr of cranks, the thuds of aircraft landing on deck — this last of which I matched to X-Wings jumping to hyperspace.
• Focus debug: Using the debug plane to make sure the correct parts of the shot are in focus throughout — because its very hard to eyeball perfectly
• Depth separation: When similarly colored objects occlude each other, it can be hard to tell that they are at different distances — a little fake rim / highlight is an easy fix to show the depth
• Hotspots: Our eyes are drawn to brightness in the frame, so if there are distracting bright objects that are not the focus of the shot, that can throw the viewer off
• Camera shake: I have a subtle camera shake in every shot to keep the camera from feeling too perfect and artificial, and it matches the slight shakiness of the original (filmed on a ship at sea.)
• Motion blur: If it’s a shot with very fast motion, adjusting the temporal and spatial samples in the render anti-aliasing settings is a good way to smooth the motion and make it feel more natural

In this case, I’d taken care of most of these already, but there was a slight issue with depth separation as the camera lowered, and before the X-Wing was framed against the planet. A single Rectlight placed correctly gives the main X-Wing a little highlight on the wing, and keeps it separated from the background X-Wings and machinery.

Finally, after a few more renders and the final cut to black still bothering me, I figured I could ease the transition a little but having the camera go behind a foreground element right before the cut. So I added a metal plate right at the end that wipes over the scene before the cut and that fixed it. My nerd brain also particularly liked that it felt a bit like a classic Star Wars “wipe” transition.

The final shot with cleaned up highlights and the final “wipe” transition at the end.

Big Takeaway 1: As my mentor Deepak Chetty likes to say, “Embrace the artifice.” That means do what is right for the shot, and don’t worry too much about how the environment looks from outside the frame. With a persistent environment it can feel inconsistent to have elements only in place for a single shot, but Spawnable actors make it easy to manage.

Big Takeaway 2: Checklists are your friend. There are SO many things to keep track of in a single shot that you will forget 1–2 of them every time you make a new shot — get organized.

Big Takeaway 3: If something about a shot bothers you on multiple viewings, no matter how subtle or hard to identify, it’s worth spending the time experimenting with how to fix it.

The next Studio Diary will continue with production itself, and focus on the incredibly sexy topic of how I organized the project. A big part of this learning exercise was figuring out the right workflow, and working documents / production tracking turned out to be a huge part of it.

As always, if you want to follow my progress more closely, I’m posting dailies pretty regularly to @locodrome on Instagram.