Basic Matinee Sequence

Reflection on Museum Matinee Level

To start with this assignment I decided to complete the level build before attempting to place and work with different camera shots. The building of the level went very well apart from the sourcing of static meshes. In the Unreal editor no list of static meshes is offered so it became a pain stacking process of looking through all the different folders to find the correct meshes I wanted to incorporate into my level.

After viewing several folders I decided to build a futuristic museum based on a war between humans and machines. I wanted to keep the level layout simple and uncluttered as I thought this would help with the camera work later on.

Initially I had just included two rooms into the level which were a weapons room and a vehicle room. After considering all the camera paths and angles I decided to add an extra room which would lengthen the time and also try to make the video more entertaining. I did not want to just place static meshes into the third room as I thought this would just continue on from the previous rooms and bore the people watching the video. Because we could not create action shots I decided to depicted a scene of action using still life figures.

Once the third room was complete I then started to try and place cameras and camera paths into the level. I found this process more frustrating than difficult as it felt like a very slow process. This coupled with random system crashes!

When I had placed cameras running throughout my whole level I had a total of about 4 minutes of footage. I then watched the video back and started to delete scenes or pan shots that did not add anything to the video as a whole. I also decided that the final battle room was the most interesting point of the map so decided to try and spend more time viewing this room than any other.

Once the extra scenes had been cut from the video it was then a simple case of switching certain camera routes to immediately cut to another view. This was done to prevent any rollercoaster type effect.

The final part of the project was selecting a piece of music to use in the background. I tried a few different pieces but was finding it difficult to match the pace and style of music I wanted with the scenes being shown. I then tried the Terminator 2 sound track which fitted perfectly but unfortunately was too short for the video length. Luckily I found a similar sound track from Babylon 5 which I decided to stick with.

Looking back at the project as a whole I would have benefited from some more in-depth planning. This could have meant I would have a much clearer idea of the level plan and theme I wanted to use. I feel the camera work went well and I benefited from having too much footage to start with than having too little as it was easier to cut shots than to find more.