CINEMATIC
A Mosasaur in the Cretaceous sea realizes it is not the biggest creature that prowls the waters. Stalked by an unknown life form, its life is about to change forever. Cinematography, colour grading, film editing and sound editing in DaVinci Resolve; rendered in Unreal Engine. Over 17k views on YouTube.
Cinematography, colour grading, editing and sound
3 months, 2023
Released in 2023, with over 17k views on YouTube.
Shooting inside Unreal collapses the distance between camera and edit. There is no cost to another take and no schedule to protect, so the constraint stops being what you can capture and becomes what you can decide. The discipline moves to knowing when a shot is finished.
Most of the tension in the piece is built in the grade and the sound rather than the animation. Underwater, you cannot rely on wide establishing shots to convey scale - there is no horizon and no reference object. Scale has to come from how light falls off with depth, and from what you can hear approaching before you can see it.
The film was made for educational purposes with free and credited assets, including the Mosasaurus model, an Unreal underwater toolkit, and sound from Freesound contributors - all credited in full on the video.