Meet Michelle Iannantuono, the face behind Octopunk Media, and the 2023-2024 Indie Grants selection by the South Carolina Film Commission to produce LAZZO, a science-fiction romantic comedy about a transgender teen dedicated to acquiring a new arm for his disabled android girlfriend. During the Film Track’s “Working with Unreal Engine: A Demo and Discussion” panel on Saturday 830PM in Hyatt Piedmont, Iannantuono shared her filmmaking journey and the eclectic workspace she calls cinematic art.
Iannantuono started the panel by playing Blue Dot, a 4-minute short film created by 3Lateral and using Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman Animator. She praised the film’s scope, pointing out the monologue style that supported a minimum number of characters, the below-the-shoulder shots that minimized full-body animation, the simple background that reduced rendering requirements, and the minimal use of props that would’ve complicated 3D model interactions, all points she recommended filmmakers consider when planning a film, especially when using a 3D development environment like Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.
She’d used Unreal Engine 4 back in 2018 to create Live Screamers, a sci-fi short film scheduled to stream at Dragon Con later that night. Iannantuono used a couple of tools and techniques that supported virtual production, such as Unreal’s Blueprints to script simple actions using pre-programmed nodes, and mock gameplay to record scenes using those scripted video game assets. For example, in Live Screamers, instead of scripting a creature’s movement from one location to another within the environment, she spawned multiple copies of the creature at specific locations and swapped to each instance’s pre-positioned camera when required by the script. She also used Unreal’s Sequencer, which let her manipulate options inside objects and cameras in the scene and add them to a timeline for rendering and export.
To bring LAZZO’s cyberpunk world to life, Iannantuono used motion capture and Unreal Engine 5. Her laptop struggled to take full advantage of Unreal’s real-time rendering and ray tracing technology because the cyberpunk world featured many bystanders and reflective colors, things she’d already pointed out to minimize. She upgraded her hardware and then transitioned light simulation to use path tracing instead of ray tracing, which reduced required computer resources but introduced other challenges. Path tracing wasn’t real-time, took 3 minutes per frame to render, and further required her to export individual frames into another application to stitch the video together.
After gaining an “apprentice”, Iannantuono realized something critical. She’d been learning Unreal piece by piece through tutorials as-needed instead of starting at the foundation with the application. After additional research and experience, she learned that Unreal’s built-in lighting was sufficient and that she could reduce resource requirements by pre-rendering the scene. She showed us a minute of LAZZO, and we felt every moment she’d worked hard to create.
Iannantuono showed us some other neat tools in Unreal, such as the virtual camera. Accompanied by an app that users can download on their mobile devices, she used the virtual camera to translate movement into a digital world. We didn’t quite understand what she meant until she showed us a pre-recorded clip wherein a character moved around a dark scene. The character looked up, down, and peeked around corners—all movement that followed Iannantuono’s phone when she’d recorded the scene. One attendee asked where she filmed the scene, to which Iannantuono replied that her apprentice designed the scene in Unreal Engine after six months of experience in the application. The crowd marveled at the lush vegetation in the dark environment, the graffiti and then the hole in a rundown church, and at the shadowy figure standing in the distance.
Iannantuono closed the panel with some recommendations but first answered a few questions from the audience. One question involved a Look-Up Table or LUT for applying pre-calculated filters like sepia, and whether she applied them before or after rendering the scene. While Unreal Engine supported importing LUTs, Iannantuono preferred to render scenes in their raw format and apply LUTs later using other applications. She also recommended that filmmakers using virtual production tools create using a desktop instead of a laptop for projects with demanding resources. As cinematic artists, they must understand a variety of techniques and tools, including lighting, cameras, textures, models, and animation, and they need to be proficient with a range of applications to circumvent the limitations of other applications.
