Gart230 Blog- Week twelve, Cinematic and final renders  

This was the final week of the project and I was expecting to be rushing around sorting stuff right up until the deadline but other than a busy final evening when my perfectionist side took over and I made a load of last minute changes to the cinematic it all went fairly smoothly. I initially started by trying to set up the camera for screenshots and I quickly settled on using a 16.9 DSLR camera with a 50mm Prime f/1.8 lens as this gave the shots closest to the aesthetic I wanted, I experimented with the 30mm and 12mm wide angle cameras but whilst they were useful for getting larger shots of the environment they lost a lot of the atmosphere, I also used the 85mm lens a couple of times as this was even closer to the aesthetic I had envisaged but unfortunately using a lens of this size in such an enclosed space was very hard so I decided to settle for the much more versatile 50mm lens for the majority of the shots. After a couple of attempts to take screenshots I realised that I was finding it quite hard to find good stationary shots of the environment as a large part of what makes this environment pretty is the moving aspects and thus I decided to work on the cinematic and circle back around to the screenshots.

The cinematic took a lot of work as I’m very unfamiliar with cameras and thus it took me a little while to get the hang of things like F stop, exposure and focal length but after a couple of failed attempts I landed upon a couple of shots that I liked and just kept those settings for the rest of the cinematic for the sake of consistency, I tired my best to get a variety of close up shots and ones that showcased the wider environment and feel I have done an okay job but for my next project I feel it may be beneficial to consult someone more experienced in cinematography as the cinematic itself definitely looks more amateur than I would like. Having lined up the shots for the cinematic it was then an easy job to back through and find good angles within the cinematic to screenshot and as the camera was pre-set up for the cinematic they looked significantly better than my first attempts (although I did keep some of the first wide angle attempts as they showcased the environment better but not the atmosphere) I then shot some screenshots with a 9:16 aspect ratio as this gave a very different perspective of the environment and got in aspects of the scene previously left out. Once the screenshots had been taken I took the cinematic into adobe premier pro to add music and some very basic end credits before exporting it in a more compact file format of mp4 as opposed to the 15gb behemoth of an AVI file that unreal engine had produced. I made sure the entire project was in a GitHub repo and took some modular breakdown shots within Maya which showcased all the models that made up my environment. Finally I placed all the relevant files into the structure provided by the lecturers and submitted it via the learning space.