About
About
Reverie was my senior project at Drexel University for my Bachelor of Science in Animation and Visual Effects. I served as both Project Lead and Lead Technical and ICVFX Artist. My responsibilities covered project management and keeping the team organized, while also building all of the blueprints needed to control DMX lighting and run our In-Camera VFX setups inside Unreal Engine 5.4.
On the ICVFX side, I handled all camera and prop tracking for our scenes. Even for shots filmed on greenscreen, we relied heavily on virtual production tracking and recording techniques to keep the real and virtual elements locked together.
For shots using the LED wall, I built out the entire nDisplay setup and operated Unreal Engine on set to keep everything running correctly during filming.
One of the bigger technical challenges was syncing the physical lighting to our dynamic virtual environments, especially since our character moves between completely different environments within a single shot.
To solve this, I built custom blueprints in Unreal Engine 5.4 that gave us a one-button transition for all of the physical DMX fixtures on set. This made sure the real-world lighting matched the virtual world transition in real time, even when our actress was standing on a greenscreen with the environment changing around her.
One of the more unique shots involved a turntable setup. Our actress stood on a spinning turntable while the camera moved in a straight line.
I set up tracking on the turntable’s rotation and fed that data directly into Unreal Engine. By applying that rotation to our virtual camera, we were able to fake a full 180-degree wrap-around shot. The physical camera only moved in a straight line, but the final composite makes it look like the camera flew all the way around her.
I am really proud of what our team pulled off. We presented the project at Drexel’s Digital Media Showcase, and our work was featured on the official Unreal Engine YouTube channel as part of a highlight of top student projects from that year.
You can watch the full short on our Gaslit Productions YouTube channel below.