Author: Jiahao Yang

The first idea was formed in the second week after we had identified the group in the first week and had each gone back to conceive an idea. Due to operational and time constraints, the first Idea was dropped, but the group unanimously endorsed the second Idea. Everyone in the group was incredibly eager, and I was thrilled to be working with such a wonderful bunch of people.

I gained a lot of new knowledge, developed socially, and became familiar with the software UE5. Delivering the models was quite difficult as a result of this initial exposure. The first was that each model had to be thick enough to display in UE5, since UE5 is a game engine, it requires things to be able to stand upright rather than be broken up into smaller pieces. Also, because it is a 360-degree view, the edge inside should be removed when the UV is shown to ensure that the object’s outside is complete.

This work easily fell to me since I studied video editing and compositing as an undergraduate. The character animation and the static shots of the items were generated independently due to numerous errors made by our team during the UE5 rendering stage, which caused the overall tone of the movie to be inconsistent. The general tone of the characters and objects altered differently at night and in some instances throughout the day because of UE5’s weather system, which proved difficult to control even when it was illuminated.However, the film was refined in post-colour proofing, the tones were adjusted and the film was completed on schedule.

The idea of teamwork was first a little problematic, but once the project was started, everyone got involved, and I appreciated the teamwork. We all stretched our personal boundaries in a very short period of time.

This week has been relatively easy, with minor adjustments and colour correction of the film based on the feedback given by the group. ‘Gaussian blurring’ of certain clips where the camera had no depth of field.
Adding sound effects and BGM to the footage, e.g. rain, cicadas at night, birds chirping during the day, pushing doors.

Add ‘Gaussian blur’ to the beginning and end of the film, to the opening and closing credits.

Final film

Hero Image

This week has been devoted to post-compositing and uniform colour proofing of the rendered videos of the character animations with the previous videos.
Got the sequence frames in EXR format from Chen Jixuan and Wang Kaiyue and imported them into Pr to convert the format.
In terms of colour correction, we mainly focused on the mountain peaks and the distant grass in the scene. The grass was calculated by UE generation j. In some rendered clips, the colour of the grass was a bit yellowish under the lighting. This was adjusted using the ‘HSL Secondary’ function in Pr.

Editing

Colour correction

Test Video

This week, I took the already rendered video footage of Kaiyue Wang and Jixuan Chen and post-composed it using Premiere Pros based on the storyboards provided by Jixuan Chen. The character animations are still in the process of being mixed and I inserted Adjustment layersz as clips instead.

Storyboard by Jixuan Chen：

The clips rendered from the UE are in EXR format, as they start with too much memory, and are converted to MP4 format using Pr for easy editing in post.

As the EXR format is imported into Pr at 25 fps, it has to be modified to 24 fps to match the character animation frame rate.

Editing process：