Radio Static

Overview

This short film was an idea I had in late 2022 while regularly listening to Chet Baker's music. Hearing "I Get Along Without You Very Well" immediately inspired me to tell this story. The result is a cinematic thriller rendered entirely inside Unreal Engine 5.

Radio Static served as my final project for an Advanced Animation course with CGPro. The goal was to bring together nearly every discipline of real-time filmmaking in a single production — character performance, environment, VFX, and color grading — all from within UE5.

What I Built & Learned

This project was my first time working with MetaHumans as primary characters. Getting believable performances out of the blend-shape-driven facial rigs — in sync with Rokoko motion capture data — required a significant amount of cleanup and manual animation on top of the raw capture.

Niagara VFX was used for atmospheric particle effects that underscore the tension of the thriller narrative. The Media Plate system allowed me to composite live-action reference footage as background elements, grounding the digital characters in a more convincing world.

Final color grading and audio mix were done in DaVinci Resolve, which I used to give the film a muted, desaturated look in keeping with the Chet Baker-era mood.