Working Class - Scene 5: Air Guitar

Working Class - Scene 4: Monsters

Earlier in this scene, all other kids looked similar, meaning Swiss, in contrast to the protagonist and the victim which both have immigrant roots and darker skin complexion. But after the protagonist looks up again after the victim was beaten by one of the kids, in his imagination now all the kids look exactly the same to him, and they look at him, choosing him as the next target.

Working Class - Scene 4: Sand Face

During the fight, the Italian boy gets sand pressed on his face by his tormentor.

This was a tricky one, because we had to figure out how to apply sand to a moving, rigged (even blend-shaped) surface. We applied UE projectors and particle systems with the face mesh as a target and that worked pretty well. Again - in real-time.

Working Class - Scene 4- The Fight: a blonde boy bullying an immigrant boy while others cheer him on.

That time, we did performance capture in 3s because we had 3 actors available. But here we couldn't use facial captures for the fight itself, because the cameras (iPhone 12s) in front of the faces of the actors would have been moved and damaged. So I animated those two faces by hand, using the predefined emotions library in UE.

Scene 3: Vampirellas: three seductive recreations of Vampirella turn into nightmares.

At first the scene was IIRC described as the boy looking at a Vampirella comic on the ground, and then running away because of a mixture of feeling desire and shame. This was then changed into "real" manifestations of Vampirella. Since #Metahuman doesn't have nudity, we bought them from a creator on Artstation. This ofc resulted in issues with retargeting, so I had to animate the faces by hand.

Scene 3, Shot 2, the boy taking a closer look at a barrack used by Italian workers in Switzerland, around the early 70s.

The 4 guys playing cards were captured in 2s since we only had 2 actors available on that day. Then an additional recording for the guys in the background and the boy, so a total of 4 recordings were used here.

Scene 2, Shot 2, the boy reacting to a frog he just spotted in a pond.

The boy was performance captured, while we used preset animations for the frog - which worked pretty well! The frog was from an asset pack in the Unreal Engine Marketplace & the background is all Quixel assets.

The only thing we had to add here were clothes and the glasses which were outsourced and done by NXA. Would have loved to do this inhouse, but: deadlines.

checked aaand it's built in #UnrealEngine5 #metahuman