"Fallen Angel" by Mark DK Berry - (Melodic House Music Video)

"Fallen Angel" - A melodic house track and video by Mark DK Berry.

The experimental video took three months to complete as a total novice learning Unreal Engine and was an attempt at animating Metahumans. The vocals were created using Mai - an AI vocal provided with Synth V pro. She is a little too Asian, but it worked with the track.

Two biggest issues were that animation is not easy, and clothing Metahumans is expensive and hard to make it look right. So, I removed their clothes instead, and gave them mannequin features, which may or may not get banned by YT as a result.

The animation was eventually done using Cascadeur rather than inside of UE 5.2 which I found too cumbersome. It was then imported back into UE, but I found it awkward to tweak and fix. I look forward to someone coming up with "text to animation" AI in this area, it needs it. I am not an iPhone user so I had no easy way to animate facial movement or lip sync, so I didn't bother.

I admittedly plagiarized the video idea - if you can you guess the video and song I took the idea from mention in the comments. But doing this gave me the opportunity to focus on how to light things properly and camera movements. All of which I copied rather than worry about figuring out that part of it, which worked in some ways and didn't in others. But I was trying to learn so many things from scratch inside Unreal Engine involving lighting/animation/cameras etc... hence why it was 3 months instead of 3 weeks to complete.

I am not exactly happy with the result and find it pretty cheesy, but it was fun doing it. I won't attempt another until the MoCap animation is better (android or webcam), and until animation can be done by AI from text prompts. But all the tools look promising, have real potential for making some amazing stuff, and I hope to use them again sometime in the future.

The track will be up on release on major platforms for streaming soon. In the meantime it is available via my bandcamp here - https://markdkberry.bandcamp.com/track/fallen-angel-melodic-house along with the lyrics if you are interested.

If you are a music video creator interested in AI and animation feel free to comment below, or ask any questions. I am interested in learning from anyone else who has ventured into this area and can share their methods. It wont be long before it is possible to make higher quality music videos this way. I had hoped to animate some of my album ideas, but it just isn't there yet.

Equipment used:
Windows 10 x64 with 32GB RAM (started with 16GB but increased it mid way through)
RTX 2060 with 6GB VRAM (this was the biggest issue, you need more VRAM)
Unreal Engine 5.2 (free)
Cascadeur (free version)
Davinci Resolve 18.5 (free)

and yes, with that equipment it was barely able to complete the video, and I had a lot of crashes, but I was able to finish it. I was restricted to exporting at 1280x720 and 30-fps on that entry level gear.