When I initially was planning for this project I decided I wanted to do a music video as I had never done anything like that before and I wanted to try it for the experience!
I was debating between several songs, these were all songs I was a big fan of and listen to regularly that were between 1-2 minutes or had a section we could cut out.
There is a dark place by Tom Rosenthal:
This song is meant to be encouragement for when you are going through dark times, so my idea was to have the VFXs be based on visual representations of both mental anguish and joy and hope.
Do Dilly Do by Walter Martin:
This song is about going on adventures with a friend, I imagined the VFX being based on different fun environments.
It’s all a bit too loud by Tom Rosenthal:
Overall this ended up being my second choice, it’s about being overwhelmed by sounds and other sensory input. I imagined calm pastels and muted tones suddenly being interrupted by intrusive blaring and brightly coloured effects. The lyrics are also very literal with describing visuals so I wouldn’t have to think too hard about it, I would just go off the what the lyric says and take it quite literally.
Bury The Body from Nerdy Prudes must die, a musical by Team Starkid.
A very dark comedy song from a musical I really like. The lyrics are about a group of high school friends that accidentally murder their bully and are now trying to cover up his death, with some people being a little too into it while others are scared or wanting to report it.
I thought the chaos, delivery and high emotion could translate well into VFX, like Liquid effects for blood and bleach.
I would use fire to represent one of the mains characters’, Grace Chastity, passion for murder and the guy they just killed which is a big part of the plot and her motives.
Beware! By Bear Ghost:
At the end of this song there is a quite visceral section sung by a bear ghost about hunting immoral people. I thought you could have lots of VFX in that: supernatural magic from the bear ghost, slashes and blood splatters. Its also set in a forest at night so you could do things with fog, trees, campfires…
I didn’t got for this one in the end because while it was cool I do have a phobia of blood and it occured to me I could just make myself queasy by working on something very directly murderous.
Very good wizard by Louie Zong:
This was my choice for the song to use. The lyrics are very literal and specifically reference fire and things which are good ways to show VFX knowledge.
I also thought framing the video like a low-budget advert made by the wizard would be cool as I could impliment text effects and stuff from the advert but also magic effects from the lyrics.
I continued with this idea. When it came to designing the wizard, I led with my love for making cute little guys! Then I remembered a while ago I painted a little wizard figurine that my boyfriend 3d printed which we named Archibold, so I decided to make him the wizard.
From there I made a quick 2d design of him in my sketch book:
The final decisions to be made would be exploring some visual styles to use, I really want to get good at things that are more stylized but although I struggled to decide I finally landed on something…
I chose smiling friends, a show that is mostly simple and cartoony but will have characters in weird art styles for comedic effect or to enhance the narrative:
I think going with this as inspiration is a good idea as it mostly focuses on nice simple things, but it can have slight deviations which allows me to have fun and express a broader artistic vision.
I made a quick story board.
I drew the storyboard on paper in pen then scanned it in.
I did this to come up with the visuals for each line, I wanted to keep the humourous tone but also give ample oppotunity for different effects.
I then made an animatic.
The reasons for the differences between the storyboard and animatic is that I lost the storyboard temporarily because I moved house so I did about half the animatic from memory.
In the final product I use the Storyboard for most of the shots/ideas, because there was more thought put into it but used the animatic to time the shots.
So them I had to make/source some extra props.
To start with, Archibold!
I cleaned up the scan and colour corrected it, I then brought it into blender and added a lil bit of depth too him. so he could be seen from a few more angles.
When I uploaded him to the Unreal project, he appeared to have become a god?
It would not import the material.
Weirdly the issue was the file name so I had to change that
But when I applied the material he was indented/the wrong way.
So we just used the basic plane in the end. So much for all that…
Next the hands:
I found this pointing hand model online at:
https://free3d.com/3d-model/pointer-v1–510788.html
I was struggling to find 3D hands for free on websites that didn’t make it an absolute pain to download OBJ files.
So, for the others I ended up taking photos of my boyfriends hands:
I then cut them out and coloured them pink. with a Screen layer followed by a multiple layer to match teh shading on the archibold drawing.
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