Lotos station

a virtual production project

SCAD (SANM_560 Class)

ENVIRONMENT OVERVIEW

THE JOURNEY

Entry 1 - September 12th, 2025

Today was our classes first meeting with the Production Team. We discussed the story and environment design ideation that was developed by our class over the past week. I personally worked with the story team this week to create a more fleshed out story then the bullet points we had from the initial pitch. I spoke with multiple different team leads to make sure we all understood what the production teams thoughts for the physical set were and what our limits were for the story due to the set. I was given the role of Environment Lead for our Unreal Engine Production team, as well as general work for the Post Production team, so until we hear back from the Production team with specifics on the set I'll be talking with the concept artists and script writers to get a good view of how the set will be interacted with throughout the story.

- September 16th, 2025

I met with the rest of the story team over the weekend and we did our best to create a story that is feasible to film in the timespan we have been given (10 weeks). Although it took a while and there were several disagreements between story writers we ended up with an interesting premise and initial script to share with the class. After presenting to both the class and class mentor, Felix Jorge, we were advised of certain issues by a couple of people in our class. Certain people seemed to be trying a little too hard to step into their given roles when in actuality this is a 2 minute short film made for the most part on the LED Volume. While it should be taken seriously there is really no need to have specific people brought in from outside the classroom when there are more then enough people willing and capable of preforming those same tasks on our team already.

Entry 1 - Images found and/or created by Birdie Lynn and Danci Shen

In the rest of my free time this past week I've spent it starting to block out all of the set pieces in Unreal Engine and where everything is most likely to be, (as shown by me drawing out my ideas on a white board and some stills from the unreal level), just so that it's easy for the Production team and my team to understand in the future. A lot of issues with this project so far could have easily been avoided if people had communicated their vision for it earlier and in an understandable way, hence why I decided to make the block out of the set. Over this upcoming weekend I'm going to finalize it and check in with my team to see where they are at with model creation and texturing and determine what to have them continue with after. Today we spoke with the costume designer to figure out what our actors would look like and I think we all came to an agreement. Our main character will have military type clothing with dirt everywhere to appear as though he's been surviving on his own for a while.

- October 1st, 2025

After finalizing the block out design this past Tuesday, the goal now for the unreal team and I is to continue modeling assets and to start finalizing the master scene. I'm going to spend the whole class time this Thursday adding assets I have in my fab library from over the years to the project file to fill out the background of the environment and optimize the project to run smoothly on the LED Volume Stage when we go for our Pre-Load Test on the 9th. But as a class the main goal currently is to figure out what we want the sound to be like for the final cut, as we now have a sound team helping us with the final edit in a few weeks, and need to have examples for them to work off of in advance.

Entry 2 - September 24th, 2025

The past week has been EXTREMELY busy, multiple meetings between all members of both the Production team and the Virtual Production team. I spent multiple hours discussing with my Producer and one of the story team members to revise what we thought was the "final script". The production team seemed to have some issues with the script they were sent and so based on their criticisms we completely changed the story for the 3rd time. The rest of the weekend I spent setting up Perforce. I had to create a readable documentation using figma to make the setup process easier for the entire team to understand. I had a team member helping me and at some point the entire depot for Perforce was deleted on accident. This of course, took the rest of the weekend to fix.

- October 11th, 2025

Today was Work Session day! My team and I met up in the classroom to work on the environment and ended up being there for 9 hours straight. When I got to the room I immediately set up a "Task List", for everyone to see who is assigned what asset and what still needed to be done. Once people started showing up I handed out the tasks for the day and everyone got to work. There were lots of questions related to what the models should look like and what the lighting situation would look like, so this was the perfect time to address those questions. I worked on the overall environment, adding assets as they were completed and crafting the design of the wall in relation to everything else in the scene.

- October 14th, 2025

I arrived to class barely late due to filming all day on the LED Volume, but after arriving got straight to work. I began by doing my daily presentation of the current progress of the UE Environment. This time it was way more detailed and only needed a few more specific things such as textures, and rubble/debris. The class seemed to be extremely stressed about the current status of the project but I assured them it was going well and we were making great progress, especially after the work session we previously had and myself spending every night working on the file. I spoke with the Production design team to see what changes needed to be made on the giant left wall that I put together over the weekend since it did not match well with their singular column. I also had the bridge modelers start remodeling to also base their bridges more closely on the column then any of the references that were provided by the Production team. We have another load test on the 16th and hopefully we'll be able to finalize any technical issues that have occurred since everything else will be ready for the shoot day.

Entry 3 - October 7th, 2025

The week started off very good, I had spent time working on the environment, getting the basics started with that, so that everyone would understand how it's going to look when its detailed and not just blocked out. The Production Design team visited to take part in the discussion, as well as bring information about the things they were currently working on. As a collective we talked about the current iteration of the door model and thought about how the bridges would look, since they still need to be modeled and textured. The blocked out area for the walls on the left side of the track also need to be discussed, since they make up the entire background of the environment they are extremely important. We have some ideas and we'll see how they look after I spend the weekend working on everything. We decided to work all day this Saturday to get as much of the environment done as possible, while being able to get help from each other.

- October 9th, 2025

Load test number one was today and it was extremely helpful to see what issues we have and what needs to be fixed for shoot day in a couple weeks. I discussed a lot with the rest of the UE team about what we need to adjust and model. Seeing the environment on the giant scale of the LED Volume Stage is great to tell what needs to be scaled up/down based on human size, even though I measured everything based on unreal's metahumans, which are supposed to be to scale with real humans, we still needed to scale a few assets differently just to make the overrall environment look better on the stage. After the load test I stayed with a few of the UE team to go to the Production Design teams class and ask them a few questions that the directors had. Since none of them wanted to stay after I volunteered. It was super helpful however, we got to see the in-progress physical set along with a bunch of props and material swatches their team was still working on.

Entry 4 - October 16th, 2025

Today's one of the final days before shoot day! We went to the LED Volume for a pre-load day and saw everything that needed to be finalized before next Thursday. It seemed like there was a scarily large amount of work left to do so understandibly some of my classmates seemed stressed. I explained to everyone how the majority of work was just texturing that was already in progress and just general finishing touches like foliage and debris, so we weren't actually behind schedule at all. I've been working every night after classes to check on the status of my teams tasks and to make sure we'd be ready for shoot day, so I'm not worried. I spoke with the Production Design team again while at the Volume to see what notes they had on the current state of the virtual set compared to their physical set and they had a few things for me to look at, which were extremely helpful. Sometimes when you've been looking at the same thing for so long you can't see the small issues with it so it helps to have an outsider look at it, especially in this case. Also, we finally received a small model of the physical set from the Production Design team which is helpful to understand what their set will look like when it's finished.

- October 21st, 2025

Second to last day before the shoot. I got to spend the entire day at the Volume today, because I was at a shoot for my ScadPro class all morning. After spending the entire weekend working, along with the rest of my Unreal team, we had the entire environment almost finalized and ready to film on. It was only missing a few textures still but they were basically finished, just not in time to add them to the project file before it was exported for the Volume today unfortunately. But even so, we were able to use the time to talk and plan out anything we hadn't already discussed related to filming, regarding the door animation, the insert shots that will be filmed in Unreal, and other things like that. After we left the Volume everyone decided that tonight, we will finish the entire environment, besides the things that can't be done until tomorrow of course.

Some BTS photos from the final Pre-Load day.

- October 23rd, 2025

The final day before we film all day tomorrow! The Production team finally brought their set to the Volume and we were actually able to see how well it matched up to our Unreal Engine Environment and it looked so good! Of course the coloring and lighting was a little off but only because we had no idea what it'd look like all together so we spent the day making the final adjustments and matching everything to make the Volume and Physical set as seamless in camera as possible. We had an industry professional visit today as well, Eve Roth, and she spoke to us and gave us advice on the project. For our first shoot day, she'll be there to help us out all day so anything we might not know and/or might've missed in the environment integration will be able to get fixed. I picked up the fog machine we needed yesterday and brought it along to the set today in case we wanted to test it, which we did end up doing, and it does create a lot of smoke so it's perfect. I spoke with the 2 directors to see their thoughts and just to generally prepare for tomorrow, since I'm sure the lighting will be different then the way we had it set up virtually, because we haven't tested lighting with the physical stage yet, and I wanted to be prepared to guide my team at the computers tomorrow so we wouldn't run into any unexpected surprises with the Unreal Environment.

- October 24th, 2025

After waking up bright and early and heading to the studio this morning we finally started filming today. Eve was there again all day to give advice which was super helpful, and led to us spending every moment up until the first take completely redoing the lighting in the environment, since it had been previously finished in a way that caused a lot of fps drop and just generally was easier to work with. I personally spent the day talking with literally everybody present at the stage, from the Directors to the DP to the Production Design team and the lighting crew. I was going back and forth between the computer table, or the "Brain Bar", as it is called at the Volume, and all the people that I needed to talk to in order to make changes to the environment in between shots, and to let them know when we were ready to go for a new take and if there were any inconsistencies from one shot to the next. It was a lot of work but thanks to my Unreal Engine team and everyone on set we were able to fix everything and make sure it looked phenomenal while filming. We ended up being at the Volume all day, making the most of the short amount of time we had to film there, and hopefully everything we have left will be able to get done on Monday and then my role in this project will switch to Post Prod work for the last 2 weeks we have left to complete this project!

Entry 5 - October 28th, 2025

After yesterday, our final shoot day, filming is now wrapped! So the whole class moves into only post-production work. Now that everything is done with the environment I turn into a visual effects artist and have to begin helping out the rest of the Post-Production Team with any tasks needed as assigned by the Editor and/or Producer. This week we spent talking about everything that was left to be done for the final film and what shots needed what effects just so that everyone stayed on task and had something to work on to contribute to the edit. We talked about ideas on submitting to festivals and just generally went over any concerns from the Editor and discussed general thoughts on how the project has gone so far before continuing to work on our assigned tasks for the remainder of the class time. I personally worked on getting our unreal file back from the XR Stage since nobody had grabbed it before we left and we needed the version we had made lots of changes to throughout our shoot days, not the version currently available on Perforce, which was from before both shoot days.

- November 4th, 2025

The weekend was spent mostly working on the final things that needed to be done, such as the video and our website. I was asked to help on some peoples tasks since I didn't have a lot to do and so we finished all of that stuff, we are just waiting for the rough edit to be done so we can start vfx and things like that. I was asked to render a few insert shots in unreal to place in the edit and so I did that relatively quickly since we had the unreal file back and everything was the same as it was during filming there wasn't much to adjust for it to look correct. We started preparing for a presentation next class with an person from the gaming industry, Matthew Ward, who is going to come to our class to see our project and give his advice which should be very helpful!

- October 30th, 2025

Our second class this week, on the 30th, was spent celebrating both our achievement of wrapping filming and Halloween. I had received the unreal file from the nice people at the LED Volume and we began going through it to make sure everything was correct and still working in case the disguise plugin messed anything up. We worked on our assigned tasks while watching a Halloween related film to keep everyone in good spirits for the rest of the 2 weeks we have left.

- November 6th, 2025

After presenting to Matthew he gave us plenty of valuable insights on the professional side of using Unreal engine and just general knowledge of the filmmaking industry as a whole, it was very interesting to hear his thoughts on our project. From what we talked about I honestly believe we taught him some new things he might not of thought of before, this technology and it's use is still so relatively new that you can always be learning more from everyone that uses it, so it's always nice to get the chance to talk about it. Next week is our final week of the class and so our project will be finished not long afterwards hopefully, since we all plan to continue helping out the Editor and Sound designer with anything they need to finish off the short film!

Final Thoughts and Opinions

Now that our time in class has come to a close I would like to talk a little about my thoughts on the project overall and how I feel it went throughout the last couple months. In case it wasn't elaborated on enough earlier I'll remind everyone reading that this project was only 10 weeks long. We entered the classroom for the first time 10 weeks ago with nothing but possible ideas on what we would write a script for and eventually shoot on the LED Volume. Our only limits were what we thought we would be able to accomplish over the course of the class, along with what the Production Team we worked with was able to create for our physical set of course. Since one of the most important elements of this project was the pairing of a physical set with my team's virtual environment we had to continuously share our ideas of what we wanted to film and check if it was actually possible for a set to be created. Overall I truthfully feel that my class, and the Production Teams class, did a phenomenal job from start to finish, from creating a script from scratch and only really building the environment for the last 5 weeks leading up to the shoot days everyone did so great and any issues had were mostly solved relatively easily, for the most part. I'm so proud to have this project done, really the first time I have worked on something with this big of a team and just getting to design something that is used on such interesting technology such as the LED Volume, or XR Stage as we sometimes call it, has been such a great learning experience. All of the interesting and helpful people that visited us throughout the weeks to offer help and guidance on all parts of the project were so appreciated and hopefully in the future I'll get to talk to them again about other projects! I think during my time here at college this is one of the best classes I have been a part of, and I would hope that I'll get to work with most of these people again, if not throughout the rest of my time in college then outside of here, in the industry, making awesome projects and films together.

The final short film will be released soon and as soon as it is the link to both the film and the website will be added here for everyone to check out and comment their own thoughts on!

Google Sites

Report abuse