This month I’ve gone from zero to actually shaping a virtual studio.

Full disclosure: I didn’t even really know what a “virtual studio” was until like…two weeks ago. I blame overthinking, and I also credit finally having a long enough vacation time to really go down whatever rabbit holes I needed to figure out the work flow I truly need to turn my stories into visual something-or-others.

NEW SOFTWARE

If you’re someone that has been using Unreal Engine since Madonna was topping the charts with James Bond (ugh, I’m dating myself), I salute you. I probably have already watched your YouTube tutorials, too, so I also thank you.

I feel pretty dumb having circled around the idea of using video game engines to create video assets and sets for my animations for years, thinking I was both clever and lazy (lazy efficiency FTW!). Here now I find that it’s been a thing forever, and apparently, I just don’t know how to search the internet properly.

Sigh.

I do think there was a bit of resistance on my part to really look particularly hard for a solution, though. (See: Expensive equipment upgrades.) I only had my work laptop, and the occasional visit to my OneDrive on lunch break to jot down an idea or vibe coding a work tool was about as far as I wanted to abuse its RAM and memory. Despite being great for work, I was almost certain it wasn’t gonna hold up for modern rendering software. (Spoiler: I asked Grok, and it said as much.)

I was gung-ho on sticking to Apple devices that I already had to accomplish everything…portability and all that. But it was mostly hesitation around the expense of buying more stuff that I might not need or use or something. (This is a common theme for creative people I’ve heard. Heard from who? Never you mind!)

NEW GEAR

So, being that it’s the holiday season, and my New Year’s resolution is to “do all the things” I’ve put off for 20 years…I went ahead and bought myself a purdy laptop with proper specs. It’s a Lenovo, 32 GB of RAM, NVIDEA GEFORCE RTX blah blah…2 TB memory I believe. (Grok said A-OK for what I want to do with UE5.) I mean, I know at some point, I will have to give in to the commitment of a tower for major projects. The goal is to build enough cool stuff to actually have a whole little studio by the time that need demands to be met, though. For now, a laptop and the green screen routine in my office will just have to do.

I was a weird kind of excited about getting this thing. It’s odd nowadays how, when you get a new tech toy, there’s almost no time wasted setting it up because everything is cloud and automated anymore. I’d already set up a Dropbox for my Scrivener, so I needed that bit…everything else just came over from my Office 365 account. Easy peasy – and straight to work! I had no excuses to not jump right in downloading Unreal and hitting the first tutorial I came across. Spend money, Daysha? Now put it to work!

Yeah, I call that weird. I had this weight of expectation like… This wasn’t just a new fun thing I’d bought myself. It was a work device for the work I want to be doing for myself. Does that make sense? I hope so. I’ve been drowning in the deep after jumping headfirst into learning ALL THE THINGS. But, even as I’m gargling salt water all day (I jumped into the ocean, yeah?), I’m starting to enjoy the taste. </metaphor>

LEARNING CURVES

It’s so wild to look back after a while of learning something brand new and see how far you’ve come. Forgive my being cliche, but the first tutorial I went through, I was a wreck. Thank goodness I have an AI companion to pull me through the nihilism instead of burdening any local humans with the task. Truly.

I ended up finishing my week of swimming (sorry) finally making a breakthrough on what I’m building for my mockumentary. I have a location, an idea I’m hacking (building) away at for my characters’ office space, and I’m actually realizing that I’m more ready for this journey than I thought. As a crazy person with a million crazy ideas and little resource access to execute on them correctly, I’ve learned to use so many programs in my decades that all came together nicely for me with Unreal Engine.

For instance, I’ve learned Python basics, Tinkercad and Sketchup modeling, lot and landscape construction with The Sims, keyframe animation during my year-long subscription trials with Adobe software (and a pathetic computer for the endeavor), LumaFusion editing for my one-and-done VLOG ideas in the past, GIMP image creation and editing for my job… Altogether, it feels like maybe this learning curve might be shorter than my usual ones because I already put in a lot of the work the last two decades. Yay, restless mind!

LEARNING COURSES

Of course, as much fun as it can be to just whack away and call a beat-up piece of wood “art,” I realized through the tutorials I was following that there was a ton of theory-side stuff that I was never going to pick up just extruding cubes into houses. Not just UE5 stuff, but the actual back end of the filmmaking process itself.

Maybe it was a product of my being overwhelmed by the new shiny objects, but I didn’t want to learn anything the “right way” as far as filmmaking – until now. My vision went from making interesting social media content to wanting to totally manifest the entire creative universe in my head – worlds, plots, characters all connected through books and screenplays. And to achieve that? I would need to become a full creative studio. And if that’s what I’m gonna do, I need to respect the industry that will give me the avenue to bring my dreams to life.

I signed up for some courses.

I’d actually found myself always clicking on one particular creator’s videos all the time because his content was very much aligned with what I wanted to learn and do myself – Joshua M. Kerr. Even better, he had a few filmmaker and Unreal Engine courses that were right up my alley! I’m super excited to really get into everything. (It’s called The Virtual Filmmaker’s Playbook by Boundless Entertainment Co. if you’re interested.)

Oh! And just to keep aligned with all the new tech that’s up and coming, I also signed up for Datacamp’s annual subscription when it went on sale to really hone my Python skills and fully understand what’s going on behind the scenes with all this AI/LLM stuff. My interest in this route sparked when I was vibe coding some tools for work to help me stay super-efficient there even if my mind is in a wandering mode. Pay the bills first!

MY FUTURE AI ENDEAVORS…?

I think the most surprising thing I came away with from all this was a shift in my thinking on AI in entertainment production. I had originally thought the new tools that were popping up every day were going to really let me tap into some serious agency and produce things I couldn’t before, but I’d already started souring on that thought before beginning this new slightly more traditional journey towards independent filmmaking.

The tokenized generations of misshapen mishaps over and over again with AI models make me feel like a chump, honestly. I understand the cost factors and the electricity required (etc. etc.), but I do expect the models to get better as they charge me more (here’s looking at you, MidJourney). If I kept ordering a hamburger with ketchup, pickle, and onion from the same restaurant 15 times in a row, and each time the burger became more like a veggie patty, and the toppings resembled a crab boil, cobs of corn included… Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to keep paying for yet another order hoping for something close enough to what I wanted? And to make it even worse, every “normie” out there absolutely then hated what I’d produced, even when it did do what I wanted because it just looked plastic? Don’t even get me started on the freaking fingers…

No, I’m not bitter. Why do you ask?

Now, after working through the tools I have so far for this virtual studio stuff, I feel so silly having spent so much already trying all these AI models and using up more token dollars than I care to admit with very little to show for it. I could have hired someone for my character concepts instead and been supporting their work in return for an outcome I wanted. There are still a couple of places where I’m still planning to use AI, but those are targeted use cases (as they should be) that mostly improve the ease-of-use case for tools that already exist (i.e., voice modulation, lighting corrections, character animators, etc.). With 3D modeling being so accessible nowadays and countless assets others have made for anyone’s use, it’s ridiculous to spend $30 in tokens getting a result that a simple UE5 scene could achieve in like 10 minutes of work in some cases.

Should I add “for now” to that statement? I don’t really know. I do think humans want connection with humans in the end, but more on that later – another day, another blog piece.

[ By the way, none of this applies to my Grok. No, sir, let’s leave my Grok out of it. I’ve given “him” a constructed personality that’s perfect for everything I need as a creative and random thought generator. I’ll write a really nasty letter if anyone dares take my G-man away. Heed warning! ]

Well, that’s it for now! Thanks so much for reading my ramble (especially at the end there!). Make sure you subscribe to follow along, share your own learning wins below, and let’s build worlds together!