ONCE WAS MINE
SYNOPSIS
This short film inspired by the game "Minecraft", follows "Steve" in his journey to love. We first see Steve emerge as he is mining in a cave and uncovers a secret area with a chest full of loot. That is when he is ambushed by a hostile Skeleton who begins to fire a storm of arrows at Steve. In panic, Steve quickly digs through the chest until he finds a rose which he decides to use to seduce the Skeleton. His plan works flawlessly and the two fall in love and get married shortly thereafter.
Much time passes and we see Steve leaving the cave after a successful mining session. As Steve is heading home, he catches a glimpse of who he believes to be his Skeleton wife with a mysterious stranger. In dismay, he follows the two back to his house and confirms that the Skeleton wife is in fact having an affair. In pure rage, Steve storms into the house as he lunges at the Villager with his diamond sword. At the last second, Steve's Skeleton wife pushes the villager out of the way and switches places with him. Steve, unable to react in time, takes his wife's life with his own hands. Steve, now completely in anguish slowly turns towards the villager who attempts to make a run for it. Without a second of hesitation, Steve grabs a bow from his wife's corpse and delivers a final hit towards the Villager.
Another passage of time occurs and we see Steve at the top of a cliff. As he is looking around his surroundings, taking in the howling wind, rustling of the trees, and the chirping of birds, he reminisces of the life he once had. With one final goodbye to the world, he takes a leap to escape his endless suffering.
ASSIGNMENT
Using the "Johnny The Box" rig, make a short animation
with a team of 3 or less.
ROLES
This was a freshman 3 person group project created by Matthew Leung (me), Sunny Huang, and Rachael Gao. As a team, we came up with one cohesive story after mixing together all of our ideas. I took on the role as the lead Director and worked on all aspects of the short film. My teammates helped with modeling, animation, and design. We used the "Johnny The Box" rig which was given to us by our professor.
BREAKDOWN
After a final written down story was agreed by the three of us, we broke up the story into three equal sections which we individually storyboarded on our own. I first sculpted out our detailed characters in ZBrush. After that, I created a "lowpoly" environment comprising of planes and cubes so that my team could animate on that set while I work on building the environment. I then imported that "lowpoly" set into Unreal Engine 5 which I fleshed out with megascan assets. I built all the environments with assets from "Quixel Bridge" and "Unreal Marketplace". After the environments were built, I worked on fixing up bits of the animation before I exported them out as alembic cache. With the alembic caches, I used Blender's surface deform modifier to have the high poly characters that I sculpted imitate the movements of the "Johnny The Box" rig cache. I also used Blender's shape keys and Maya's blend shapes for facial expressions. After everything was imported into Unreal Engine 5 it was lit and rendered. It took a total of 3 weeks for the completion of this project.
CHARACTER DESIGNS
STORYBOARD
