For every shot, I directly set keyframes on the camera. I mainly adjusted the camera’s position, rotation and focal length. By doing this, I first got the overall narrative rhythm of the video right.
The storyboard included some “shaky” shots that feel more like memories. So I spent some time figuring out how to create camera shake in UE5. I tried using the Camera Shake Base blueprint, and also experimented with manually setting noisy keyframes in the sequence. This was to mimic the feel of real handheld filming, instead of using a perfectly steady virtual camera.
By the end of the week, all the key shots had a basic camera animation draft. There is still room for improvement in smoothness and detail control. But this moving preview already lets me see more clearly how the scene will look when it’s fully animated.