Unreal Engine Cutscene Studies
Cutscene sequences designed and rendered in Unreal Engine.
- Unreal Engine
- DaVinci Resolve
Opening and in-game cutscene studies I created for my “Cinematography in Games” course at university. Both are built on the same premise: a first-person psychological horror game set in an abandoned research facility, where dialogue is almost absent and the story has to be carried by environment, light and camera behaviour instead.
The first video is The Other One, with its pre-production plan and production report below. The second is Awakening, with its design document.
Design Decisions
The choices I made in these scenes, and the reasoning behind each:
- Open inside the character’s perception, not outside it. Awakening starts on a 100 mm extreme close-up of the eyes at f/1.4 — depth of field so shallow that everything behind the eye plane dissolves. The player is held to exactly what the protagonist can perceive, before being given any context to work with.
- Animate focus so waking up is a process, not a state. The POV shot of the surgical lamp pulls focus from blurred to sharp rather than cutting to a clean image. Consciousness returns over time, and the player sits through it.
- Remove the character to let the room become the subject. One shot excludes the protagonist entirely and creeps forward roughly 1.5 m over ten seconds under a single failing fluorescent (6500 K, intensity keyed between 0 and 110). With no one to look at, the facility itself is what gets characterised.
- A dolly zoom for the moment of recognition. In The Other One, the discovery — the body on the table has his own face — is held on a Vertigo-style dolly zoom, so the space distorts around a character who is standing perfectly still.
- Cut rhythm as a dramatic curve. The opening movement runs slow and fade-linked; the memory montage then collides six flashes of two to four frames each, with exposure keyed on constant interpolation so nothing eases — there is only impact.
- End wide, because control has to change hands. The closing 18 mm high-angle shot reduces the character to a silhouette in a red-washed corridor, and their final position matches their starting position in gameplay — so the cut into playable control never relocates the player.
Throughout, the 180-degree rule is held across every transition, and an eyeline match links the opening close-up to the shot that reveals what the character is looking at.
The hardest part of production was fitting the animations correctly to the character rig.