Graduate Portfolio - Crash Landing Cutscene

Crash Landing Cutscene

22/10/25 - 07/11/25

Introduction

This blog post explores the development of the crash landing cutscene using the Terrax character rig. This will show the development from preproduction techniques to completion including all work in progress along the way. This will show a detailed insight into the development of this outcome as well as reflections that steered the creative and technical development over the course of production.

Project Management

Firstly, it was important to reflect on where I was at in terms of the production schedule, shown below. I had made some good progress on the gameplay animations, however, decided to focus on this cutscene animation exclusively for this week since I had some time off work. This would enable me to dedicate all my attention to this each day which would aid the continuity of its development rather than dipping in and out in between work. The gameplay animations were more suited to dipping in and out since the individual loops could be completed in less time than a full animation. Therefore, it made sense to pause with these gameplay animations and focus on this cutscene animation all day every day across this week off. This should make production easier and more focussed.


Looking at time in general it appears that I am on track according to the production schedule. If I can completely finish this cutscene animation in this week it will significantly reduce the amount of stress and work needed to fully complete this module. Therefore, this is a goal I have set myself and if completed it should mean that the academic writing can be started sooner and with any luck - if I can finish prior to Christmas then I can have a well deserved break!


The above image shows a Trello card that organises the tasks that will need to be completed in order to create this animation in the order they need to be created. This uses previous experience learnt from producing similar animations as a guiding light. For example, once a set is created then cameras can be set up and locked in. Once the sound has been planned and acquired then this can be integrated into an animatic which will provide a solid visualisation of what this animation will look like.

Therefore, generally the project was in a really good place and focussing on this animation this week, whilst I have time off will aid my workflow.

Overview

This cutscene was planned as part of the previous module with the core idea being that the character is sitting in a cockpit when alerts start to go off. As more and more alerts go off the character becomes more and more panicked before ultimately crash landing. This should blend into the gameplay animation sequence where the player would crash landing on a planet and begin exploring. Therefore, as part of this module it should be possible to present these two animation with a link between them.

Treatment

Camera is facing the character as if we are looking in through the window screen.
  1. Slouching in the captains chair watching a movie eating popcorn.
  2. Alarm goes off (Red light).
  3. Casually presses a button that makes the alert go off. (Doesn't move much).
  4. Continues to eat popcorn watching the movie.
  5. 2 Alerts go off.
  6. Looks slightly concerned, sits up and presses a few buttons and switches. The alerts go off.
  7. Character says "Phew!" and returns to slouching.
  8. 3 alarms go off.
  9. Character startled.
  10. Franticly presses buttons.
  11. Alerts momentarily stop.
  12. Character waits cautiously.
  13. Even more alerts go off and flashing lights.
  14. Character panics and exclaims: "Argh! Why won't it stop?!"
  15. Grabs steering controls and as the spaceship crashes.
  16. Cut to the planet scene with character laid on the floor.
  17. Character gets up and dusts themselves off.
  18. Gameplay begins.

Storyboard

The two images below show the storyboard for this animation. This captures the treatment from above and clearly visualises this. This is the strongest storyboard I’ve ever created because I feel the flow from frame to frame is clear and able to easily visualise what is happening in the animation. There is a good array of facial experession communicated which make it easy to understand how the character’s emotions change throughout and this will clearly drive the acting out of this animation. This in turn will support the facial animation and acting through the animation itself.


Environment Assemble

22/10/25

The images below show the construction of the set using assets by Fishboe (2018), J.sparrow59 (2023) and L_Krajewski (2016). The goal here was to create a cockpit environment with a control panel in front of the character and lights that could signal alerts around the character.



The above image shows how a series of lights have been positioned around the character’s chair and on the control panel in front of the character too. Part of the animation needs lots of lights to start flashing to create the sense of panic so adding in lots of lights was important. I’ve also incorporated a mini version of the exterior spaceship inside as a small Easter-egg and can also serve as an additional alert light.


The above image shows the view from the camera which will form the main shot. This matches the storyboard, closely even if it is slightly to the side. These modifications were made so that the control panel is visible so that you can see the character typing as well as the alert lights in the foreground and background. It also maintains the character in the centre of the frame, which does match the storyboard. Therefore, whilst this might change slightly I was happy with this level of balance and the storyboard itself has helped directed how this environment and character have been set up in the scene.


The above image shows a test render of how this scene might look when rendered and the below image shows some similar post production colour correction. This helps me start to understand what the final quality of the animation will look like and ensures that all textures and materials are rendering correctly. Overall I’m really happy with this progress because it feels like the animation is starting to come to life. I’m also happy that the render quality is looking visually appealing, which makes me excited to see the final render of this moving.


A key part of this animation was to have lights flashing so I needed to set this up. I turned the lights into mesh lights, included some emission and added an atmosphere to start creating the glow. This was generally working well, it was looking a little hazy so it would need further balancing later. I’d also experiment with bloom to try and get the lights looking more emissive.


The below image shows further exploration focussing on the miniature spaceship model also being turned into a light. I thought this added a lot of personality into the scene and extended the Easter-egg idea a little further. It also adds greater variety to the alert lights in the scene and when all the lights start flashing, will help make it feel even more chaotic.


Now that the scene was well composed and the shot camera was set up it was time to prepare the moveable assets for animation. The below image shows the rig developed for the chair, using all the core theory learnt from rigging the main character. There is a simple master control, main rotation and ability to animate the arms of the chair. This has turned out well however, there was an axis issue on the main part of the chair that meant it didn’t rotate nicely. This was easily fixed by reorienting the joint but did create some other offset issues. This was fixed with some pain and needed me to take a few steps back before moving forward again. However, this was future-proofing the rig by tackling problems that would have inhibited development later.


The main ship controls were a bit of a pain to rig. I needed to prepare the mesh since it had some holes in it and then I experimented with a few solutions before finding the best case solution. I tried a spline rig to create a bendy stem, however, this caused issues with the rotation on the handle. I opted for a really simple IK chain with an FK controller on the controls. This meant the character would be able to grab and rotate the controls whilst allowing them to pull from the base and bend. Since most of the stem wasn’t in shot I didn’t need a really complex rig and it was easier to get this simple IK working. I then used some skinning techniques to create a soft blend across the stem to make it look like this was flexible. In the end this solution worked perfectly and didn’t need any more complexity for the purpose of the animation.


The next challenge to solve was attaching the character to seat. I needed to have the feet independent from the seat so that he could rest his feet up and on the floor. This mean the COG needed to be constrained to the seat but the feet IK handles needed to be unconstrained. I was able to pair the COG controller to the chair, however, I couldn’t then animate on top of that since the node was directly constrained. I tried just parenting the COG group to the chair and turning off the constraint to the master controller, however, this then broke the link between the COG controller and master controller. To fix this I went back to the referenced rig file and added an attach group underneath the COG controller. I then refreshed the rig in the scene and parented the attach group to the character and this then allowed the character to move when the chair was animated and gave me flexibility to animate the COG controller on top of this. 

This image below shows the hierarchical setup of this fix.


This gif below shows this new setup working and demonstrates how when the chair rig moves the character moves but also how the COG can be animated on top of this. This was a really lovely solution and great to solve a technical challenge that could have made or broken the animation. It needed to be solved since the character was sitting, however, without modifying the rig the results were glitchy. Therefore, it was great find this relatively simple solution and since I was working with a referenced file it was great to be able to modify the original file and have this pull through to the animated scene.

Sound Sourced

25/10/25

Now that some technical challenges had been solved it was time to move back to creative. Following my production pipeline created I made the Trello card show below that focussed me on the sounds I needed for the animation.


With this focus in mind, I create a folder and put any sounds I sourced inside this as shown in the image below. I sourced sounds for 2 asset packs I owned (Gamemaster Audio, 2020; Sidearm Studios, no date) and also from klankbeeld (2023) to gain some audio that could be used for the T.V. The character was watching. This was a fairly straight forward process and created an easy and focussed directory that could be easily imported into the animation.

Animatic

The video below shows the animatic produced for this animation. It brings together the previously discussed sound effects I curated with edited frames from the storyboard, creating a timed visualisation of how the animation will play out. This is particularly useful as it can now be used as a guide for acting out the scenes and informing the production of the final animation. It also helps me better imagine how the finished piece will look and feel.

This stage was particularly successful as it builds directly on the storyboard and brings it more to life. The addition of sound helps the animatic feel more grounded and believable, further supporting visualisation and timing decisions. These structured developments are helping the project gradually come to life, with each stage building on the last. The animatic will next be used to act out the animation, allowing any necessary timing tweaks to be identified and refined based on how long actions actually take.


Live Action Reference

Continuing the momentum I acted out the animation to further understand how the actions would pan out. This created an additional level of audio and enabled me to further visualise the animation. This help me lock in timing and created an audio track that could be exported and animated to. It also create pose and timing reference that will be used to inform posing throughout the animation. This also proves that the idea will work and solved any challenges that weren’t visualised in the storyboard, such as how transitioning from typing to pausing would work. 

Preproduction has been very strong and has added a lot of clarity to the production of this animation which should lead to a strong animated outcome. Clarity of idea is coming through strong and this additional layer of acting helps clearly inform the actions that will happen in the animation. This has now provided a strong base to build upon through the animation blocking.

Layout

26/10/25

It was now time to start animating the scene, however, I noticed an issue with the spaceship and walls rendering black and without textures. After investigation I noticed there was an issue with the UV sets and when I copied the UVs over to the correct UV set it rendered properly again.

Below shows an image of the character posed in the scene. This was a little challenging to position the character correctly in the chair, however, once these initial poses were created it would be easier to build on. I put a lot of time into tweaking this so that the character felt like they sat in the chair naturally and if this was rushed it would have created more problems further down the line. 


I spent a good deal of time perfecting each core pose and the below images show each pose rendered. This effectively created a rendered visualisation of the animatic using my actual character. This could then be turned into a video and the storyboard animatic could be turned into a rendered animatic. This would further help visualise what this animation would look like.














The video below shows the rendered version of the animatic that includes all the blocked out layout poses. All of these poses were driven by the storyboard frames and these frames were replaced with the rendered versions. This took quite a long time to do, however, in doing so it create a really strong framework that could be built on later. I was getting more and more excited at the level of how this animation was looking, particularly because the render quality was also looking good. The next steps would be to create the animation blocking by adding breakdown poses and ultimately working then animation down to a pose on every 2 or 3 frames.

Blocking

27/10/25

Now that the animation layout pass was complete more detail could be added to create the blocking. This started to bring the timing closer to life and added in more animation principles such as anticipation. The below video shows this developed blocking pass. The quality here was good and built on the previous layout pass. It was clear to see how the animation was developing even though more work was needed to make this feel fully alive. This is proving that the animation pipeline from preproduction to production really supports the development process and leads to good quality outcomes. It felt like there was a clear process to follow and that each stage of this pipeline could be explored to a high quality which makes the next stage even easier. 


The next video show below is moving towards ‘blocking plus’, which shows further development. Whilst it does need more breakdown poses, especially with typing, the core movements are starting to be fleshed out. The next goal is to move this to 4s so that every 4 frames there is a pose, this will help me further control timing and move me closer to the spline phase. Entering spline too early can make it tricky to properly visualise the poses and problems, whereas sticking with this blocking enables timing to be controlled more manually. Following this professional pipeline should lead to a high quality outcome and the current visual quality shows me that it is trending this way which is good!

Blocking Plus

28/10/25

The video below shows the last refined blocking phase that includes much more of the key poses needed to bring this to life. There is more motion on the chair as the character moved around, more poses in the facial animation and the typing has been implanted. This has now moved onto a key poses needed to at least every 4 frames and the motion is starting to really come to life. This should mean that the spline phase is controlled more strongly by the manual key poses I’ve put in rather than Maya’s spline process. You can see this clearly through the range of poses that have been blocked in.

Spline

The spline phase tends to move the animation from looking great to looking muddy and horrible. A lot of polish is typically needed to bring it up to par. In this case there absolutely is some of that feeling since some poses need to be a lot snappier, however, on the whole the previous work on blocking has kept this looking good and less floaty than I have experience previously. Again this highlights that the pipeline I’ve been following is working to support high quality production.


29/10/25

This next video below shows the polish and refinement on the initial spline pass to make all the core motions feel a lot snappier. In the future there would need to be a pass on various elements such as the facial animation, hair, fingers and more. However, working with the spline animation it enabled me to view the final animation and fine tune the posing to get all the core transitions between poses feeling really snappy.


The below image shows the Trello card of the progress made so far. It also includes additional focusses to help organise the work I will be doing over the next few days. This includes the comments I recently made about focussing on particular elements of the character, like the facial animation, and working to improve the quality of these elements. This enabled me to clearly focus on particular elements and bring all these different elements into the level of quality I was aiming for.


30/10/25

This next video below shows further refinement and polish with the spline pass. 


Next the animation of the blinking lights needed to be implemented. There was initial rendering set up, however, I experimented further with the values that would be animated to achieve the result shown below. The overall lighting setup using a Skydome light was also tweaked to balance the render quality.


The next video below shows further polish on the spline pass, this time focussing on the facial animation. 


31/10/25

I wanted to run a low resolution test render at 540 and low sample rates to see what this would look like when finished. I wanted to visualise the flashing lights to see whether it achieved the desired effect from the storyboard. In this animation the ears, hair and final lighting still needed to be added. I was getting an odd shimmery effect on the skin where it looked like the colour balance was shifting. Upon further experimentation it seemed to be the emission and mesh lights causing this effect together. I would possibly need to utilise one or the other to remove this shimmery effect which was distracting.


01/11/25

Next I focussed an animation pass on the hair and the ears. Animation pass after animation pass has lead this animation to be systematically developed and improved over time. It helps to have a clear focus and put effort into perfecting that particular area. 


02/11/25

Next I focussed on the final lighting and render quality. The intentional was to balance the lighting colour to reflect that you might see inside a cockpit but also consider elements like the screen casting light onto the player. I used the HDRI (Yakovlyev, 2018) because it included a lot of mechanical elements that would bring good colour into the scene. This pulled in some orange lighting into the scene that I could balance with the blue lighting from the TV to create a complementary effect. There is also a really slow rotation on the light so that it created the effect of movement in the lighting as if the spaceship is travelling through space which alters the lighting that enters the cockpit.

The T.V. Screen includes a flickering effect. Initially, using a MEL script, a random exposure value was set between a frame range on each frame. This worked, however, because it was every frame it looked too erratic. To fix this I implemented a linear interpolation so that a value would be set and it would blend to that value over a frame range before choosing another. This meant that the flickering effect was much softer. I tested a range of short renders to check this value until I settled on values shown in the test render below.


I shared this footage with (Williams, 2025) who questioned how the audience knew that we were in a cockpit of a spaceship and suggested adding a window. This would be tricky because I would need to edit the existing geometry which could be difficult or cause errors with lighting or textures. I suggested adding an exterior establishing shot to further contextualise this as a cockpit. 

To create this shot I animated the spaceship (L_Krajewski, 2016), this space background footage (4K Space Stock Footage, 2023) and a space sky HDRI (Zaal, 2024). This composition is shown in the image below.


04/11/25

The video below shows the final render of the animation. This took 10 hours to render, however, the render quality looks extremely appealing. This was rendered from Maya Arnold using EXRs and composed and colour corrected in Premiere Pro. There is an animation breakdown after the animation showing the animatic, acting, blocking and final rendered animation that plays after the main animation. This shows the process and preproduction that has lead to this strong animation, reflecting one of the strongest animations I’ve ever made.


Vimeo Link : https://vimeo.com/1133608609?fl=pl&fe=sh

07/11/25

I shared the final render with (Williams, 2025) who commented that it was looking good, however, also highlighted that it would still be good if I could still add a window so that we can see space in the background. They sent this image below to visualise what they meant.


I understood what they meant and it would be good if I could add this window. I thought I could change the material on this section of the environment so that it looked like glass and then render with transparency I could composite space in the background. They sent this below image shows what I managed to achieve. This works somewhat, however, the challenge was that I had to delete faces behind the newly created window so that the transparency would pull through - this then created some gaps. It also showed some of the metal behind the window at the top and was generally difficult to create. If I was creating the set myself it would have been easier to achieve, however, working with someone else’s assets was difficult. Another option would have been to texture a space image onto this section but this would have looked like wallpaper and would looked flat and motionless.


I tried a test render and this created another problem in the lighting and render quality. The newly created transparent window was pulling light in from the background and due to the atmosphere settings to create bloom on the flashing lights it washed out the entire scene with the light from the Skydome entering through the window. This could have been fixed by rebuilding all the lighting and render settings, however, this would have taken a significant amount of time that I unfortunately couldn’t spare. I was happy with the current lighting set up and whilst I agreed that a window with space would look good - the time taken to create this would not be worth the effort. I still needed to build the gameplay animations in Unreal Engine and complete the critical blog post and I only had a month and a half left. I’d also just lost my Fridays when I was working on the masters to the new job I had just started. So unfortunately the decision was made to stick with the original render quality.


Conclusion

In conclusion, this animation has been extremely successful and has produced some of the strongest, narrative driven animation that I have created to date. This is absolutely attributed to the strong preproduction processes followed from treatment to storyboard to animatic to acting out to layout pass to blocking to spline refinement to specific animation passes and final renders. The end outcome shows a good character performance as the character goes from bored and nonchalant to concerned to panicked. This is also a good demonstration of the rig I have created to produce this performance including the facial rig to create these expressions. It was disappointing that I couldn’t implement the feedback without investing a significant amount of time that would have hampered the progress of other outcomes I still had to produce as part of this module, however, the inclusion of the establishing shot I still feel solves the majority of the issues with contextualisation.

Reference List

  1. 4K Space Stock Footage (2023) YouTube video, added by Stock Footage Collective - Free Motion Graphics [Online]. Available at https://youtu.be/8jxNIuamNyc (Accessed: 20 December 2025).
  2. Fishboe (2018) Industrial Caged Light, April 28th [Sketchfab]. Available at: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/industrial-caged-light-4009774b4a2541b991810e0f5c18adc2 (Accessed: 20 December 2025).
  3. Gamemaster Audio (2020) Pro Sound Collection. Available at https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/audio/sound-fx/pro-sound-collection-50235 (Accessed: 20 December 2025).
  4. J.sparrow59 (2023) SCI-FI CONSOLE, January 13th [Sketchfab]. Available at: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/sci-fi-console-1e90be74ada0441c9573bfdd684968af (Accessed: 20 December 2025).
  5. klankbeeld (2023) Freesound. Available at: https://freesound.org/people/klankbeeld/sounds/717418/ (Accessed: 20 December 2025).
  6. L_Krajewski (2016) Soma04 spaceship low poly - interior, April 27th [Sketchfab]. Available at: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/soma04-spaceship-low-poly-interior-843361ad169040fba19fe8758f5bd396 (Accessed: 20 December 2025).
  7. Sidearm Studios (no date) Ultimate Sound FX Bundle. Available at https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/audio/sound-fx/ultimate-sound-fx-bundle-151756 (Accessed: 20 December 2025).
  8. Williams, A. (2025) Linkedin direct message received by Matt Lawson-Hall, 05 November.
  9. Yakovlyev, O. (2018) Aircraft Workshop 01. [Polyhaven]. Available at: https://polyhaven.com/a/aircraft_workshop_01 (Accessed: 20 December 2025).
  10. Zaal, G. (2024) Rogland Clear Night. [Polyhaven]. Available at: https://polyhaven.com/a/rogland_clear_night (Accessed: 20 December 2025).


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