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The Dormant (In Production)
A personal short film developed in Unreal Engine 5, originally initiated during coursework at Studio Arts and later expanded into an independent production.
Focused on cinematography, layout, animation, and visual storytelling within a real-time 3D pipeline, the project builds on over 5 years of professional experience in previs, sequence work, and animation.
This film is currently password-protected. Please contact donkimviz@gmail.com to request access.
Animal Logic — Lab Log Series #02
Approach (2025.09.17)
This is the second shot idea. At this time, I followed the class assignment more closely—in the class version, Manny walks up to something, activates it, and that leads into a change in the environment and an enemy setup. I used a traditional Asian lantern with an orb as that interaction point.
Before, I didn’t include the orb since I wasn’t interested in that idea. This time, I followed it because there were some techniques in that setup I wanted to try and learn.
I carried over the two elephants from the first shot and had them pass by camera to remove them naturally from the scene since they’re no longer needed. I added animation layers on their head and trunk so they feel like they recognize Manny as they pass.
The shot starts low in the grass, which is not my usual cinematography style, but I wanted to try something new since I don’t get to experiment like that in a professional environment. As Manny walks forward, the camera slowly moves around him and leads the frame toward where he’s heading.
At the end, the statue and lantern are revealed again as a closer setup for the next moment.
All animation at this stage is still based on Mixamo and existing asset animations, focused on blocking and staging rather than polish.
Animal Logic — Lab Log Series #01
This is my personal passion project since 2025, temporary title, “Animal Logic.” I was initially drawn to the name because the earliest version of the concept was about a world where animals had adapted and continued evolving after human extinction. Over time, the story direction shifted quite a bit as the project developed, so the official title will be completely different.
Back in 2021, I had some prior exposure to Unreal Engine while working on Lucasfilm shows, but I never really had the chance to properly learn it in production since the pipeline allowed artists to continuously use Autodesk Maya for shot creation. I was encouraged to learn Unreal earlier by my supervisor, but I was honestly too comfortable staying in my existing workflow and didn’t push myself at the time, which I do regret a bit now.
Later in 2025, I had the chance to join the Unreal Connector program through the ETP program at Studio Arts, which became my first real opportunity to actually spend time inside Unreal and start learning it properly. What started as a class assignment slowly turned into something I wanted to develop further as a personal project. After a vacation trip, I realized the project file was corrupted and I couldn’t open it anymore. At that time, I didn’t fully understand how Unreal works and didn’t have the knowledge to troubleshoot or recover the file. So I decided to rebuild it from scratch, and now I finally feel like it’s a good time to start sharing the journey—from last September up to where it’s going, starting from the beginning.
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Rebuild (2025.09.16)
This version of the shot was very early-stage and experimental, built entirely in Unreal Engine with a focus on iteration rather than final output. The scene was lit using a basic master scene setup without additional lighting, and LOD and other optimization settings were not yet adjusted, since the priority was rapid blocking and exploration.
The scene composition was driven by establishing the core storytelling idea through layout and staging. Multiple characters were used as placeholders for composition planning, and a temporary texture pass was applied to the central statue-like character to help define the narrative focus during early iteration. Elephants were also included initially as part of the class exercise, but were later removed as they were not necessary for the storytelling direction.
All animation at this stage was sourced from Mixamo and template/asset animations, quickly blended together for blocking and staging rather than performance or polish. At this point, my familiarity with animating inside Unreal Engine was still limited, so the focus remained on assembling motion to test staging, camera readability, and timing in context.
At this stage, this represents an early stage of previs development, focused on establishing clarity of idea through structure, staging, and timing rather than visual refinement.
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