JOUST

Overview

This scene is from the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline — a moment I had always envisioned vividly while reading it. My goal was to bring it to life as faithfully as possible, using dialogue and sound design referenced directly from the source material, and rendering it entirely in Unreal Engine 5.

What I Built & Learned

This production was a comprehensive real-time filmmaking exercise. Unreal Engine's Sequencer was the backbone of the cinematic production — I used it to choreograph every camera cut, character animation, and environmental effect in the scene. Getting the timing and weight of the performances right required a lot of back-and-forth between the motion capture data and the Sequencer timeline.

I worked with professional Motion Capture workflows to capture the character performances, then cleaned and retargeted that data onto the in-engine character rigs. This was my first time working with MoCap at this level of complexity and it fundamentally changed how I think about performance direction.

The final output was rendered through the Movie Render Queue, giving me high-quality frames with proper anti-aliasing and post-process effects — significantly better than the standard viewport capture.