Western Explosion

This is the video I made within Unreal using VFX, lighting and sequencer, in order to create a cinematic sequence as part of my third module at Escape Studios. It took 6 weeks to complete.

The story is about a cowboy who wakes up from his slumber and notices a large quantity of orange smoke emitting from one of the buildings, indicating a fire. Panicked, he rushes towards the the building, only to get knocked off his feet from an explosion, seeing banknotes catching in the wind. He passes out and wakes up again, passing out again before he sees a money bag getting dragged off.

The perspective is a POV shot of the cowboy. The hardest part of the project, was creating realistic human-like camera movement for the cowboy. I mostly used camera shake blueprints and adjusted the flow of the rotation graph within unreal to get this effect. While it possibly isn't 100% accurate to the movements of a human, I'm still happy with how it turned out.

The niagara particles were mostly easy to implement. I used existing textures and materials to create the effect for the fire and the smoke. In addition, I implemented a material function for light coming off the fires to give a flickering shadow effect.

Similar to my last project, I implemented the cool calm blue directional light from the night sky, with the harsh orange light, coming from the smoke and fire. The electrical lights emit a yellowy white light, to showcase a more artificial colour.