Sound
First part of my post-production was sound. I did a quick low quality render of all shots to bring into Davinci then spent a few days finding sounds effects and music, trying to find ones that best fit my atmosphere. I wanted different music for each scene but also to make sure the nature sound effects could be heard clearly. I found it hard sourcing the right music as I wanted each one to flow together well. Eventually I found a way to blend them by using an underwater sound effect as the camera passes through the portal thereby smoothly silencing the music and building up the next track.
Final Fixes
Once I had my sound I exported a first draft of my film to get feedback on during our last class. My lecturers gave me a few things to fix – I needed to correct the shadows on the ivy of the oak tree, darken the inside of the forest shack, fix the portal image so it looked more like the next environment, add more smoke covering plants in the city scene, fix the deer’s jump animation as it still looked floaty and lastly to bevel the rocks more in the city scene where the deer climbs up on the rubble.
Rendering and Colour Correction
When it came to render my shots at a higher quality for the final versions, I was unsure what render settings I should use. My tutor pointed me to using ACES, a different type of colour management which included me using EXR files, showed me some good render settings to try out in Unreal and advised me to look at the documentation for Unreal’s movie render queue. After reading the documents I felt I had a better understanding of what to do and tested these new settings by rendering out a short shot, following a tutorial on the ACES workflow from Unreal to Davinci.
Tutorial for ACES workflow
Link to Render settings documentation
Unfortunately, I began having issues with the ACES workflow, specifically that the colours were showing up completely different in Davinci. I played around with it for a few days but couldn’t get the ACES colour to work. Eventually I switched back to an sRBG colour workflow while keeping the same settings and using EXR. This looked much better but still not perfect, so I went about colour correcting them. To save time I tried using the same colour changes across each environment. However eventually I had to colour correct each shot separately which took a long time and still didn’t fully fix the colours to how they were in Unreal. In the end I switched back to using PNG files as they looked the best. Now that I had my sound sorted and my shots looking how I wanted I began making my title. I had already figured out the name and font I would use but I wasn’t sure how I would have the title appear and disappear. I settled on making the title be blown away like snow to fit in with the opening shot. After some research on how to do such an effect in After Effects I was able to produce this.