Cinematics Projects
In 2024, I challenged myself to regularly create Cinematics projects to reflect publicly some work I’ve created internally. In 2025, I’ve continued this initiative and created a new first person realtime cinematic and have been collaborating with teams internally at Certain Affinity to implement cinematics in addition to my regular work duties. This has already successfully resulted in cinematics being put into our active builds and vis dev animatics.
The videos you see below were filmed in Unreal Engine 5 with camera tracks animated by me either in Cinematic Sequencer or utilizing toolsets like Rokoko’s motion capture suit and LiveLink to film with external equipment.
FPP REALTIME CINE
Leaving GDC 2025, I set out to make a 5 minute first person Cyberpunk-style cutscene that happens all in realtime.
I’m proud to say I successfully built it in two weeks.
It was an ambitious project to do as a solo dev, but I wanted to really challenge myself with this one! So I spent a week starting on the plane home from GDC ideating and scripting out a scene that would support my goal and also be realistic and utilizing the tools to help me achieve the goal. I then spent two weeks implementing the cinematic and am proud to say I shipped this project in only three weeks from ideation to publish, two of them actually building the cinematic.
I mocapped everything myself with a Rokoko Smartsuit, touched up the mocap using Maya, made the paintings in Photoshop, added FX to the VO in Premiere, and built it all out from a vanilla UE5.5 project file. I found environment assets in FAB and then rearranged the rooms to fit my needs and relit the scenes accordingly.
After receiving a few rounds of feedback on this project, I decided to revisit it a few months later to address a few key concerns. So I gave myself a 6 week milestone to address the changes and update the piece.
The first thing I did was convert all of my original longer-form mocap takes into key “hero” gestures and poses, transitioning between them using generic idle animations to more properly reflect how I can get interactive sequences working in-game using preexisting animation sets. These were setup using triggers that would play a specific animation and take over from the idle pose/animation. This exercise was exceedingly educational and taught me quite a bit on motion capture root placement, considering that when creating sequences in-game, and how best to assemble your scene positionally so that it’s as seamless as possible.
I also converted all of the voiceover to be attached to the head animation, instead of living in the overall timeline, this way if I moved the motion take over, the voiceline would automatically follow. This also led me to making a very rudimentary emotion system to denote what emotion our character is using, which was a super fun exercise!
This combined with a ton of smaller changes like additional scenes, new FPP animation sets, new lean in animation instead of a digital zoom, and more!
Please view the second version as well as another behind the scene set below:
Slay Remake
I decided my first project to showcase my cinematic knowledge would be to remake Mold 3D’s Slay Unreal Engine 5 sample project.
Created in just about six weeks, I recreated every existing shot, either using their current motion as inspiration or reblocking the scene entirely. I also added new shots to alter the story in small but meaningful ways, giving the mote of light agency in the story as well as introducing Echo to the story a little earlier.
For Slay, I took the existing shots, storyboarded what I wanted to do, refilmed every shot with new camera tracks, added new shots to add new context/story beats, and relit/added fx to scenes that needed it.