Personal Project- Doodle
Introduction
We started this project with a simple idea: that every step of your journey, no matter how difficult, has made you who you are today. It was exactly the path you needed to take.
This idea—that our lives are shaped by our thoughts and choices—is one that many stories explore.
Films like Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” and Makoto Shinkai’s “Suzume” often ask us to consider the paths we’ve taken. While we might look back and wonder “what if,” these stories remind us that the life we have now is the very one we were meant to live.
Brainstorm
During this phase, my partner and I discussed further using keywords like “life trajectory” and “parallel universe.” We found more similar films as references, and although we hadn’t finalized the plot, we decided to emulate director Christopher Nolan’s style.
Then we wrote our first script, which was a very complete story, but problems also arose. It seemed too long. Our brief mentioned that the final length of this work should be controlled at about 1 minute, but if it was to be produced according to this script, it would have to be at least more than five minutes.
So, we sorted out our ideas again, and this time the ideas were more concise and clearer.
Based on this, we wrote a simpler script. Although it still looks a bit long, the duration should be controlled at around one minute.
Final script
An art teacher feels stuck, teaching kids’ art in a rundown school instead of living his dream as a great artist or a world traveller. One afternoon on the school’s rooftop, feeling dissatisfied with his life, he flips through his sketchbook. He finds a strange piece of paper tucked inside—a drawing by one of his students. As he hesitates, a black hole suddenly appears and pulls him in.
He wakes up in a bizarre space surrounded by mirrors and people congratulating him. Through a large mirror, he sees a successful, well-dressed version of himself giving a speech. Horrified by this life he doesn’t want, he tries to escape. The mirror under his feet shatters, sending him to another world.
He lands in a desolate, post-apocalyptic city consumed by a sandstorm. As he looks at the grim, grey landscape, he feels lost. Then, a single piece of paper, a child’s drawing, flutters into view from the sand. He suddenly realizes that his students had been his biggest source of healing all this time. He wants to go back to them.
He lunges for the drawing, and a bright light engulfs him. He finds himself back on the familiar rooftop, shaken but holding his sketchbook. He quickly finds the drawing, and a look of relief spreads across his face. He smiles, a true smile this time, and walks back into the classroom.
Storyboards （part）
Production stage
For this production, we decided to use a combination of green screen compositing and CG. We planned three scenes: the rooftop, the mirror world, and the apocalypse. The rooftop scene was a composite of a live-action green screen performance and Unreal Engine scenes, while the other two scenes were rendered in Unreal Engine using metahuman, essentially pure CG videos.
Green screen shooting and compositing
This was my first time directing a green screen shoot, so I didn’t pay attention to many details, which caused some trouble in post-production. For example, I didn’t know that when shooting green screens, you should avoid using the MP4 format. Even though the resolution reached 4k, the picture details were still too low.
Although some of the issues were fixed in Nuke, there were still obvious flaws when the characters were composited onto the background. In the end, we decided to cover this up through post-production color grading.
The basic part of the scene was built in UE, but our plan will require the use of special effects such as lightning and black holes, which require the combination of Houdini and finally rendering in Unreal Engine.
UE 5 Virtual Production
Metahuman
For the character part, I used Live Link Face combined with Metahuman Creator to scan the actor’s face. Although the accuracy is not very high, it still quickly solved the problem of character production.
This also greatly reduces the compositing time. Metahuman performs better in the engine than I expected, so I don’t have to spend too much time on unifying the color tone and reducing goofs.
Breakdown
There are not too many difficulties in making the mirror world, but it is worth mentioning that because there are too many mirrors at the same time, the number of reflections becomes an important parameter. The default number of reflections in Lumen is not enough to meet the needs of the scene, resulting in many mirrors being black. This problem was solved after increasing the parameters.
The apocalyptic scene primarily used existing assets from fab and other websites. While this seemed easy, the assets came from different authors and software, and their textures and model sets were very different. I spent a lot of time organizing the assets, deleting duplicates and covering any blobs. Once I had the scene in order, I began adding my own elements and relighting.
Originally, we planned to create particle effects in Houdini, but because I had already updated Unreal Engine to 5.6, I couldn’t import the particles into Niagara using the plugin. I had to create a simple particle system using Niagara.
Amazing!