A Story Of Grief

Made in a group of 3 students using Motion Capture to capture real-life motions in a digital form, and then using Motion Builder to convert and clean the animations for use in the Unreal Engine 5 where the they were used in the creation of a short cinematic.

My Role:

• Creating/Polishing Animations for the Captain Character

• Doing the Motion Capture for the Knight Character

• Writing the story and scenes

• Only person working in the Unreal Engine

  • Creating the Environments & Lighting

  • Creating the Camera Motions, Scene Transitions, Character Placement

  • Setting up the Character Animations in Engine

  • Programming the playable build with title screen, player movement, and interactions to start the cinematic

Story Briefing:

A knight returning from the war finds out his wife passed while he was away. Falling ill from a plague and passing shortly after she was buried in a distant swamp to keep the illness away from the town . The scene opens with the knight walking up to the grave of his wife kneeling down in front of the grave in silence he grieves before picking himself slowly walking further through the swamp fading into the distance as the scene closes.

The scene re-opens to a cliff side and the knight walking up to the edge as he pauses looking out he sits down reminiscing the times he and his wife would sit at the cliffside together looking out at the tree tops. Shortly after the captain comes up the cliff to the soldier hearing the news the captain tries to comfort the knight. With a light nod the knight expresses his thanks to the captain seeing the captain proceeds to take his leave giving the knight space to mourn. Time passes as the knight sits in his sorrow as the scene fades back in the viewer sees the ghost of his wife sitting next to the knight. The knight unaware sits with his wife one last time together.

The Motion Capture Animation being polished in Motion Builder