Alienated VJ Clips & Tutorial

This month’s VJ clip reward on Patreon is Alienated, check it out:

Available On Patreon

Alienated is a set of 6 VJ clips, in 1080p & 2160p DXV. It includes a journey through an alien tunnel, light reveals & light chases of the tunnel, an opening gate and an alien artifact. It’s available now and until 31st December 2022 to superfans on Patreon.

Superfans also get a Resolume Arena project with variations to the clips & mixing arrangements that are set-up in columns. More on that in the Tutorial below.

How To Mix Alienated On Resolume Arena

Get to know the Alienated reward and how to mix it, why I created a gate clip, and how to open and close it. Some radial & linear tricks and one reference to an inspiring movie.

Creation Process

Alienated is created with assets from the Alien Sci-fi Corridor and the Control Screen packs.

I followed the same technique I used to create the Subway reward, I first assembled one unit (incl. floor, walls, ceiling & lights), then collected the parts into a blueprint (in Unreal’s menu: Convert Selection to Blueprint Class, then Harvest Components). I then created a copy of the blueprint and moved it closer, repeating this 8 times to create a corridor. I adjusted the lights’ intensity on the blueprint (and it immediately affected my scene), because having 8 parts one after the other had accumulated too much light in the scene. I then added the Gate’s parts at its end and opened-closed the gate like a happy child.

Now I had to create a copy of this whole corridor and push it in the distance so it’ll loop when the camera flies through the scene. At first I wanted to harvest the entire corridor’s blueprints into a “master” blueprint, but then, not wanting to over-complicate things, I just duplicated the 8 blueprint parts & gate, and moved them backwards.

Here’s how it looked inside Unreal Engine after the scene was assembled:

Creating The Clips

The first clip I rendered was the camera flying through the corridor; the camera is animated on its X axis inside a level sequence. I added some volumetric fog to make it look more eerie.

I then duplicated that level and, using the exact camera animation, added a point light to the scene and animated its position and strength in the sequencer.

Next, I repeated the same steps but this time the point light had 4 different locations – what created the 3rd, light-chase, clip.

I felt that I could utilize the gate to create a sort of “framing” element, so I created another sequence where the camera is stationary, and the gate animated up and down on its Z axis. Everything looked great but I still wanted to create another element; looking through the assets of the same studio who created the corridor, I saw a couple of weird meshes in their Control Screen pack.

It included a bunch of Alien Artifacts (for lack of a better word). I chose one and, by duplicating it and rotating on its Y axis, created a radial cloner array out of it. I placed it in the corridor and just let it “hover” there; I loved how it looked.

I then decided that having a single artifact element could be useful as a building-block for many other arrays inside Arena, so I made it pan right & left gently, and rendered that 6th final clip.

And there you go, Alienated was ready to be released to the human-dominated world.

What's next?

Shall I carry on with the Alienated theme for the next reward? Perhaps create some more elements in this style? If you have ideas or suggestions regarding the next VJ clip reward, feel free to DM me on Instagram / Facebook and let me know.

Amaze them! 🤘