You might have noticed I posted a new short film on my YouTube channel, Re-Entry. If you haven’t seen it yet, please check it out.

This is the fourth short film I’ve completed this year, not counting the faux movie trailer I made for a competition. For this film, though, I didn’t submit it to anything; I just wanted to put it out there in time for the holidays.

You Can Use It

I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons license called CC BY-NC-SA. This means, if you felt so moved, you could adapt it into your own creative works without having to check with me. The only requirements are that you give me a byline as the creator and that you release it under identical terms: noncommercial purposes only, and people are free to adapt your work into their own creations. Might this become the seed for a small collaborative story-verse?

How it Came Together

Twice a month, Epic Games releases free assets on Fab for a limited time. I’ve collected literally thousands of dollars of assets for free: environments, characters, and props that I could use in my films. One that fascinated me was Space Cruiser Defender by Dexsoft Games. That collided in my head with a short Halloween film (which I can’t find now!) that primarily consisted of a slow dolly toward a character who others were discussing off-screen. (Building a character by having other people talk about him/her is a great writing technique, by the way, as long as the other people don’t turn into “dialogue dummies” with no lives of their own.)

The four-page script flew together in a day. The production took two months. The moral of that story is that it’s much easier for me to write, rather than make, a movie.

But here’s what’s great about making movies this way. I spent only $184 from beginning to end. That’s not a movie budget; that’s an expensive dinner. My expenses were for two 3D assets: a hospital gown and a nurse uniform, a subscription to Meshy.ai for help with creating the astronaut zombies, and to iRender when it all became too much for my laptop. That’s it!

My son Owen Warner, on his way to becoming the finest actor of the century, helped me record the conversation of the two orderlies named Owen and Matt in my script. (Thank you, Owen.) As you can see in the picture accompanying this post, we used my Blue Yeti microphone set on a box between us. We both stood up and hunched over my desk, getting into the character of two guys at a nurse’s desk gossiping about the patient across the room. We taped the script to my hutch and wall so we wouldn’t have to look down and potentially compromise our performance. Our physical postures weren’t actually recorded; I used my Rokoko motion-capture suit for that. I also did mocap recordings for the other patients milling about.

I didn’t know how fast I could make the movie and release it on YouTube, so we recorded three versions of scene 7: one for Halloween, one for Thanksgiving, and one for Christmas. Obviously, I had to use the Christmas dialogue.

Is It an AI Film?

No, this isn’t an AI film. Meshy.ai is a service that, among other things, can convert an uploaded image into a rigged and textured skeletal mesh, which you can then download and use in your movies and games. That’s what I did to make the astronaut characters, bringing everything into Unreal Engine for setup in a sequencer.

I also used the Metahuman products of Unreal Engine for the other characters. After I separated the dialogue into two recordings (one for each orderly), I loaded them separately into Metahuman Animator, which magically created facial animation assets. That was amazing to watch. I suppose you could call that an AI feature—but those bits are it, as far as I know. The rest of the production was just hard work.

That being said, am I averse to AI filmmaking? Certainly not, or at least, not yet. As I sit here today, AI filmmaking is just another toolset out there to be used properly or improperly. I don’t know enough about it, which is why I’ve just enrolled in an online course on Udemy to learn how to do it. I might decide it’s the greatest damn thing ever, or that it’s a tool to be used judiciously. I just don’t know, and I don’t have the skillset. Yet.

Technical Stuff

Re-Entry (or “Re-Entry”? I go back and forth on styling) . . . anyway, Re-Entry was put together in Unreal Engine 5.6.1 on a three-year-old Alienware laptop running Windows 11 with a 12th generation Intel processor, a 1TB SSD, and a very tired RTX 3060 GPU.

I had major problems with the Metahumans’ hair grooms flapping all over the place, so I generally built characters with short or no hair, or I used hair-card LODs. Blake Woodman’s long mountain-man hair liked to move around a lot when the sequencer snapped him into position, so I usually had to start my renders 20 frames before the “action” mark to give it time to settle. The “straitjacket” forcefield, among other effects, was adapted from a downloaded Niagara asset, and that required an additional 50 warm-up frames to get going.

For artistic purposes, I made some other cinematic touches that had nothing to do with 3D animation, things with camera angles and focal lengths to communicate Blake’s latent power and what’s on his mind. See if you can spot them, and if you’ve read this far, tell me what you think about them.