Aesir

AESIR

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K1818372, Daniel Loten

 

This is the Individual report for Daniel Loten, K1818372. My title for the role I undertook during the project was called ‘Cinematic Designer’, however both myself and the other members of the team assisted in all areas of the planning, design and creation of the Narrative game. 

The work that I have solely contributed to the game was the entire Cinematic (minus two voices), the Screenplay for the narrative game, as well as designing and writing the latter half of the script (The first half was designed by Lukas). Finally, all of the sound design was implemented by myself, as well as constant editing & changing of the games Audio and Cinematic Shots to ensure the final project was up to the standard we desired.

 

We had no difficult people in our project, and I have enjoyed every minute of working with my team. It is apparent that we all enjoyed creating this game, and everyone thrived at their roles. Any issues faced as a team in our previous project have been sorted, and I believe we make a fantastic game development team.

 

Creating cinematics in Unreal Engine 4 ended up being a lot more difficult than I initially expected. When I first set out to create the cutscene the problems I faced were immeasurable. Since we didn’t cover how to use Sequencer at university until quite late into the project, I set out to learn sequencer myself. Throughout the project I feel like I have learned a lot as I have created the content for our game. 

 

One of the main issues I had to tackle was how to move the characters through the cinematic. Learning exactly how cutscenes differed from the in-game world was quite daunting, and since our animations didn’t utilise root motion I had to manually move the characters through frames to try to make a realistic movement.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Various paths were plotted for the characters to take, which were viewed and changed over multiple takes. I also adjusted the animation's run times to suit the speeds that the characters are moving. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I included animation blending to provide a smooth transition from one animation to the next.

An area I would have liked to improve upon would have been adding FX to the sequence. I attempted to implement a burst of smoke (or similar elemental effect) as loki transforms to the 

 

Camera angles were something I struggled with extensively at the beginning of the project. I have never done camera work before, and I found myself having problems with the layout of the shots. We had previously drawn up a storyboard for the project which was an essential tool for setting up where the camera should be focussing for key parts of the cinematic, but once we got into creating the full cutscenes, we realised we had more content and voice lines than the initial storyboard layout would allow for us. 

 

 

 

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Here is our initial storyboard for our first cinematic. It shows the first shot of our party travelling down the trail, then Bjorn gets left behind, and finally the heavy fog sets. 

However, since our section of dialogue for this scene was around 60 seconds long, I had to find ways to make the camera shots more interesting and dynamic, otherwise the cinematic would have ended up being very uninspiring. 

The first way I tried to make the cutscenes more engaging was to include a lot of camera movement. All the scenes were filled with camera swings, close ups, and pan outs, but the scenes very quickly became too wild, almost eliciting motion sickness as you watched. This is how my problem was encountered and solved:

 

I tried to utilise close ups on the characters as they were talking,to highlight exactly which character was talking. I did this to solve the issue of voice clarity, we didn’t have dedicated voice actors, or distinct models, or even moving mouths when the characters talked. I thought that by zooming in on whoever was talking then at least the viewer would be able to get a sense that each character is their own distinct person. 

While this idea worked on paper, it became problematic when implemented due to another issue I was encountering; I was struggling with switching cameras in shots, so when I needed to get a new angle the camera would just swing into place, rather than snapping to the new shot. Since the shots were 10 seconds each a piece for the first master sequence this required a lot of camera movements, and the cutscenes didn’t look good. There was too much movement, and it was hard to concentrate on anything as objects were constantly entering and exiting the shot. 

I remedied this situation in future master sequences by reducing the time of the shots to five seconds each, as opposed to the previous ten seconds. This allowed shots to be more dynamic, focusing on key details, while also incorporating camera cuts every 5 seconds if I wished. 

 

I have learned a lot on creating audio, including voice lines, for a project during my time on this narrative game. I was constantly rewatching the cinematics to see how the voice lines sounded, if they gave the right tone, or if the spacing between the dialogue wasn’t right. 

 

 

 

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I used Audacity to create a lot of assets for our game, including voices and some sound effects. I learned how to do a lot in Audacity throughout this project, and will definitely continue learning sound design tools following this assignment. In the above screenshot, a pitch editor is being used to lower the pitch of my voice by -21Hz. This created a deep, booming voice that felt  powerful enough to be a god. 

 

Voice recordings were layered to allow us to record different peoples audio at different times, then we trimmed the audio sections to provide the illusion that it's a natural flowing conversation. This allowed us to constantly come back and edit the voice lines, or add parts into it. 

 

 

 

 

 

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Included above is a screenshot of the first cinematic sequence audio track. I have layered the audio of the wind from the 31.40 mark, as that is when loki’s magic is taking an effect and the fog is reaching its apex. 

 

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Below that is the voice audio for the characters, and you can see we’ve added keyframes to it adjusting the volume. This has been done to ensure that the characters voices can be heard clearly over all sound effects, and also to keep all imported voice lines at the same volume overall throughout the entire cutscene. While some clips were completely removed and re-recorded, some parts just needed adjusting. 

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Key audio prompts are placed in relation to the scenes above, an example being the audio for our forest birds scattering as Lugertha and Bjarn realise that Bjorn is missing. 

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Included inside each shot is audio that I have tied to an actor or item in the sequence. 

I have added the footsteps audio file to the Bjarn model, to emulate him walking across the icy floor.

As Bjorn is also walking with him, he needed similar audio to be played, however the audio track was offset, to ensure you could hear the two distinct sound files.

 

An issue I faced with this project, and unfortunately did not overcome, was how to get audio tracks to play relationally to the camera. All of the audio plays from the position of the camera, there’s no feeling of close or far away. This meant that when characters were running across the screen, or away from the camera, their voice lines and footsteps did not adjust accordingly. I attempted to remedy this in parts manually by changing the audio tracks volume as they adjusted their position, but it was not an elegant solution.

 

Another challenge I faced during this project was finding a suitable music track to play during the cutscenes and gameplay of our demo. I have never created a game with a narrative before, so this was an entirely new task for me, finding audio to suit the current mood and tones of what the characters are currently feeling. Not only this, but there are additional issues to be faced, such as utilising the use of silence or increasing the volume to convey emotions. The final problem I faced was finding music that was suitable to the world's theme, for our project that meant finding music that suited the nordic theme. Throughout the project I was checking around the internet on sites such as https://www.bensound.com/ trying to find music that captured the Viking theme we had. Since I was constantly revising the voice lines we had in game, due to them not sounding right or having bad audio, 

 

An additional part of the product I worked on was the Screenplay for the game.

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It was a great real world experience writing this, as I had to be in constant communication with Lukas, our narrative designer. It simulated how I would interact with other members of a working team, and how we must communicate together to provide a coherent final product

Our team worked very smoothly, everyone got all their tasks done individually, while receiving help from everyone in the group to pass any problems they may encounter, as well as helping to brainstorm ideas or communicate to deliver a unanimous final product.

 

I am incredibly proud to have produced a full cinematic for a game, including voices, animation, movement, timescale, and flowing fluidly from shot to shot. It is my best part of the contribution, though I enjoyed every aspect of the entire project.

 

In this project I have learned how to bring a narrative from inception to final product, including hero design, how to plan a game story, use of sequencer, audio design and creation, and delivering a finished product showing a snippet of cutscene and gameplay.

This has been a very eye opening experience, and I will be pursuing narrative far more in my ensuing personal projects.