Project Inception

While taking a 2 month vacation out of the country, one of your favorite contemporary artists reaches out asking for a music video. You can't say no to this.

You have an iPad, an iPhone, and a laptop. How can you create an engaging music video with these constraints?

01. Take advantage
of your surroundings.

You're in New Zealand, planning to meander around scenic environments, it would be silly not to incorporate this somehow. The footage on its own will do a lot of heavy lifting.

02. Use the tools you
have in your pocket

The iPhone shoots decent footage, lean into the "handheld, caught on camera" look. It will actually help sell the CGI more! You can hide behind some of the natural artifacts that come with shooting phone footage.

The iPad does object photogrammetry? Cool! Figure out creative ways this can be utilized in the video.

03. Recycle your exisiting
body of work

You have been animating creatures for years, the audience of this video has seen none of it. Slap a new coat of paint on these animations and introduce them into a new environment.

04. Get creative with aesthetic,
avoid costly render times

What if instead of rendering photoreal scenes for every section, you could simply render viewport elements from the software you use to make the animations? Meta! And it matches the themes of the video.

05. Iterate

With all of these tools and methods at your disposal, keep throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks. Keep doing this until newer versions don't work as well, or you run out of time!

The Write-up

Max and I wanted to explore the idea of entities that travelled between & altered space and time with this piece -- As the video progressed, the severity of the rift in space-time would magnify. It seemed appropriate for the visual style of the creatures I design and it allowed me to experiment with compositing my creatures into live action footage.

To convey the idea of bending space and time visually, I found that capturing photogrammetry scans and HDRi images of the environment yielded very usable 3D geometry that I could manipulate in CG. Different parameters of the morphing environment are driven by audio stems of the track that Max provided, which made for some nice audio-visual moments.

3D debugging UI elements made their way into the glitch segments, which gave the feeling that these seemingly real scenes are actually the constraints of time & space that are breaking down. A good chunk of this was done in Unreal Engine thanks to the help of Vince McKelvie. Doing these segments in a video game engine allowed us to use custom-made shaders that generate feedback loops in realtime.

Everything is filmed handheld on a phone, on location in New Zealand - I wanted it to feel as if the footage captured were isolated sighting of these creatures. You’ll notice that lots of lens flares, handheld shakes, and general visual artifacts are retained in the footage which I thinks help sell the compositing work as well as the ‘random creature encounter’ vibe.