BLAZE THE F##K UP | Videoclip CGI | W.I.P | V1 available

Catypic · June 18, 2020, 5:06pm

Hi everyone,

I’m pretty new to the Blender artists forum as this is my first W.i.p thread. I was wondering where i would put this thread but “focused critique” looks just perfect ! I’m Sébastien, a swiss guy so i used to learn and chat about blender on french communities and website but the quality you can find here is just so good.

The aim of this thread is to get as much feedback as i can through the second part of the devellepment of this project. So dont hesitate to tell me what’s bad or good but not used enough. If you want information about the process I would also be glad to let you know of i did.

Project progress

As you can see the project is already in an advanced state. The music i’m working in is 4:30 minutes long, as I already done 2:30 we can say that i’m halfway done with this project. Still, i’m obviously open to change things in this first part if you feedback gives me arguments to do so.

THE Project

With two musician friends of mine, we form the band CURL, an interdisciplinary crew mixing Music, cinema, dance and vjing through a show of 1 hour. You can get more info about the crew here

If our music interest you, you can listen to it right on streaming plateforms like here. We are beginning so we only have several tracks at the moment.

In the crew i’m doing all visual related stuff : photography, set design, graphic design but more importantly VJING ! We have a giant screen on stage just behind us which show vjing during the whole show.

In this thread we are gonna focus on the music video of one of our track called “BLAZE THE FUCK UP”. The clip is fully rendered with Blender, post production and editing is done with Da Vinci Resolve.
The robot has been done by Neelo, then uv mapped, shaded by myself. Animations are mostly from Mixamo and the buildings of the city comes from Kitbash3D. Textures are mostly from the Quixel Megascan librairy.

Lore

The music video picks his references in pop culture (the first reference was the animated batman opening of 92), Star wars movies and other anticipation or sci-fi movies. The video clip is part of serie of few tracks which shares this post-AI, techno-futurist meta univers. The story takes place in a short term futur, something like 2070.

PITCH

A crew of Hackers called “Technomancian” hijacks Elon Musk. Over the past years he had built a whole society of androïds with a collective intelligence. The hack will liberate the thinking of the society and let the emergence of the first cultural revolution of a post-AI androïde society.

Next steps

As mentionned before, their is 2 minutes of video to be done, I will post here my progess.

In term of storytelling, the goal will be to make it clear that the hack which happen on this planet is a much more global event which will affect all robots using the firmware of Elon Musk through the universe. We will travel through many places where the hack is gonna change the way life is organised and get more informations about the “Technomancian” gang.
I will keep in focus the concepts of cultural revolution (might be a cognitive revolution ?) in an androïd society.

My workflow stands in a few steps

General narrative conception with the other member of the crew
Storyboarding
Animatic (Take the drawings of the storyboard and start to edit them to establish a simple version of the rythme of the video).
3D scene création (set design, characters, lightning, secondary animations).
Cinematography and primary animation.
Optimisation and render.
Post-production and color Grading

About deadlines, I would like to end this project around the september, which will probably be feasible as i achieved this version in 2 monthes, working on it a few days per week.

SO we are at the end of this presentation and the very begining of this thread, I can’t wait for your feedbacks, don’t hesitate to critic, talk about what works good but isn’t pushed enough, what doesn’t work …
If you have any specific questions about my process or any technical questions, dont hesitate to ask me !

Have a great week ! And see you soon !

Ho and i got a few videos showing the progress of the project, would like me to post them here too ?

DNorman · June 18, 2020, 6:47pm

Hi Catypic,

first congratulations, I have been convinced for a long time that the music industry should take more advantage o cinematic visual effects especially CG and VR. Watching the video I was imagining seeing the show live with a great PA huge screens and the musicians interacting with the images, It looks like you guys are heading to put on an exceptional show. This is big festival stuff, I have worked in quite a few and know what goes down well.

As it is I think this will already work, but as you ask us to «nit-pick» I watched the video twice to see if there was anything I did not fully understand, the first part for me is basically introductionary and the images really start to sync when the «rapper» gets on scene. I like the fact his movements are smooth and human in contrast to the jerky slightly off sync robots, I am only saying off sync because they seem to have slower reaction, but I like that and it works well.

The only image that took me some time to understand is when you focus on face of one robots which remains totally stagnant while her body and arms move around (like one of those Indian dancers who always look strait ahead). Maybe it would benefit from a slightly longer viewing angle so that you can see a bit more of the moving body to understand the concept. Or a zoom out (smooth or jaggerd).

As I say it is nit-picking! The video is impressive, modern and interesting to watch.

Again congratulations.

RSEhlers · June 19, 2020, 9:02pm

I changed your title as inappropriate for a large diverse audience as we have here.
I know…we live in a different time now and anything will and can be seen and heard on the net, but we still have standards, and this falls along the line of NSFW.

I hope that you understand.

Catypic · June 23, 2020, 11:09am

Hi

Yeah no problem, I even asked myself when i posted if I should censor myself.

First thanks for your feedback, I think you understood pretty well the projet, we hope to bring this kind of content into big festival.

I agree with your feedback, a teacher in my school even told me the same suggestion. The idea here was to have some kind of a “selfy shot”. Imagine that the camera was attached to the face instead of the face not moving like a gimbal stabilisation.

Something I might want to change as well in the beginning of the clip is the city shoots with the “screen overlay effect”. I feel that their is some kind of a disconnection here. If their is this effect of “hey this is displayed in a screen inside of the fiction”, then i should make it more integrated to the fiction. It’s called homodiegetic. Maybe i could place some kind of a surveillance room inside of the “technomancer headquarter”.

Hope to bring some news stuff here pretty soon, have a great week !

Cat

DNorman · June 27, 2020, 1:28am

Hi cat, sorry I put my finger in the wound!

I think that even if the camera was fixed to the head there would probably be some camera movement even robots can not take totally static selfies while they dance!

At close inspection there is one moment 2.24 where there is a slight downward camera wobble, but it is so short that it is hardly noticeable, maybe if you do that smooth up and down wobble during more of the close ups it would give the feeling you are after.

As for the screens I did get the idea of propagandic, new order, holographic screens, I do not mind the separation from the buildings. Where there is a disconnection is with the projection drones, from the close ups you see the drones projecting but from the full view of the city there are no drones visible above the buildings to project the huge screens that fly upwards. There are lots of drones at lower levels visible but non high above.

The close ups of the drones and screens are very good I would not change that, I especially like it when you get in the concave (b side) of the screen.

By the way I checked out your web and live show videos, thumbs up! As I said before this is the way live shows should go.

Good luck with your project.

Catypic · July 2, 2020, 12:39pm

Hi,
again thanks for your feedback, after a quick break in this project i’m gonna start the the production again.

First i’m gonna apply a few corrections : the “robot selfie” shots are gonna be improved with a wider angle of view.
Then the scene in which we can see the full Qr code and actually scan it will be rendered again with a qr code which actually works. (I got brained by one of those service which activate your qr code for only a small periode of time and then ask you to pay to keep it alive). A little easter eggs i thought would be really fun to exploit !

About this, I totally agree with you with this one too but i think that i wont make that correction as it requires me to re-render most of my city scenes and means a lot of render time to schedule. I don’t use any render farm and only do overnight render with my single 2080ti (which is already awesome ).

Hope to come next time with some fresh stuff, Have a great week !

Ho here’s a walk cycle showcase i did during the devellopment of the Technomancian, might interest some of you.

Cat

Catypic · October 2, 2020, 4:03pm

Hi there,
I continued the production of the video-clip, after a brainstorm with the muscians we made a rough planification of the second and final part of the video. I will try to post a bit more frequently here but the posts will be probably be much shorter than before.

today i completed the storyboard or “animatic” of the second drop.
Basically, i tried to show the shadow work of the technomancien preparing the hack. Located in some kind of a bat-cave server room, the perfect place to manipuled datas.

The after drop is inspired by ancient battlefield scenery, everything will probably be in slow mo and the crowd will be simulated using houdini.

So, what do you think about it ?

Have a great week !

Catypic · March 11, 2021, 11:32am

Hi,

I continued the production of this video clip, I’m happy to show you the places where the second part of the clip will take place.

First we have the Technomancian virtual space which is somekind of a server room, full of power that able them to hack systems across the univers.

If you guys have a vr headset or a just a cardboard, you might want to try this 360° stereoscopic render. At the begining i only used them for fun but then i realised that it was a really effective way to look at the thing which needs to be improved in your scene.

Then we have the jungle mining site, for the moment i think that the place looks too clean to be a working place, but i’m still quiet happy with the result.

The stereoscopique 360° render

Meanwhile I’m working on the cinematography of those scenes (camera motions, animations, character placement). We recently purchased a Rokoko motion capture suit so all movement will be recorded at home . I’m really excited to dig into this

Once again i would be really grateful to have your comments about those scenes.

Thank you for your attention and have a great week !

Catypic · March 17, 2021, 3:22pm

Hi everybody !

So, I we recorded the movements of the “tech cave” scene. We wanted to have the rapper, the drummer and the bassist jamming while the hack is propagating into the solar system. It was pretty tough to get the stability needed in the cloth simulation but after a few tweeking almost everything looks fine (at a moment the bass go through the “futur Pancho” of the bassist, if you guys know how to fixe that )

The render are still eevee previews but i would love to get feedback about the cinematography.

We hadn’t the space required in my flat to record the animations of the second part (a lot of “raving” move), we will record them friday.

Bye

Catypic · March 30, 2021, 4:37pm

Hi people !

I rendered some “closer” shots of the musicians, all mouvements have been captured at home with my musician friend. I’m pretty happy with the movements and the clothes, it is sometimes a bit unrealistic when their is a rapid movement but i would say “good enough”.

We tried to record the other parts of the clip but the head sensor of our tracking suit went bad. We are trying to fix it atm.

As always don’t hesitate to comment, your feedback is welcome !

See you soon !

Catypic · May 7, 2021, 3:57pm

Hi there !

I made some adjustement to the lightning and mood of the “Tech Cave” after watching the great “Ghost in the Shell” movie.

Hope you guys like it as much as I do, It’s really taking a final shape here !

Catypic · May 10, 2021, 2:43pm

Hey just dropping another render of this scene.

Because I added a lot of elements to the scene my cinematography wasn’t on point anymore so i changed some cuts for this scene and simplified it. I’m currently rendering it, hope I will be able to show it to you soon.

Catypic · January 14, 2022, 10:36am

Hi guys !

I got a bit of time to continue this project and hopefully finish it soon !

I reworked the cinematography and storytelling of the pre drop aka “tech cave” scene to make it simpler and easier to understand. It was a bit of a struggle because the duration of this sequence is really low (~15 seconds) and I want people to understand the project of the technomancer which is to hack the behavior system of this robot society at an interplanetary scale. So hopefully we can understand that better now.

I then redesigned the lightning of the drop in the jungle colony to be more aggressive and tried to make the cinematography a bit funkier. I used especially a fisheye camera to shoot the rapper from really close so that we get some kind of an old-school yet cyberpunk vibe.

All mouvements have been recorder with a rokoko mocap suits, which is definitely cool but had a lot of hardware-related troubles with it. So many internal cables broke and we had to repair it like 5-6 time in only a year. So yeah, mixed opinions on my side with this suit. All movements have been acted by our musician Teva which is also a dancer and it’s crazy how dancers have a natural sense of motion design, really enjoy having him as an actor.

I also worked on more colorimetry-related stuff. I finally understood exactly how to get the best out of EXR renders in Davinci Resolve. Now I have filmic grades and everything looks so much better. If you struggle with that too I can recommend you the excellent video from polyfjord on the subject.

I also reworked the whole mood and aesthetic of the virtual world, I added in post a pixel sorting algorithm and it really helps to get this feeling of irreality.

Here is the animated work in progress result I can share with you today (their is a known bug with the technomancer in the jungle scene related to the motion blur, probably due to an alembic loading error)

So yeah overall cool improvement since the last update, let me know what you think about it and if you have any questions, feel free to ask !

See you soon!

DNorman · January 14, 2022, 4:42pm

It gets better and better! I really look forward to the final result!

Catypic · February 10, 2022, 6:36pm

Hey there!

Happy to share with you today the follow up of the video clip.
Really inspired by rap video clip cinematography and his upfront camera movements.
I rendered two scenes with the exact same main character movement and edited them in a very fast way to help with the build up and transition to a scene to the next one

We are approaching the end as only 2 lasts scene have to be created.
See you soon Blender Heads !

Catypic · September 23, 2022, 4:23pm

Hi Everyone, hope you’re doing good!

I hadn’t posted for the last few months but I kept working on the project and I’m here today to update you on what has been done over the last few months.

I’m happy to say that i’m almost done with the 3D production of this video clip, all clips have been rendered and now it’s time to review what has been done, what could be improved, and fix those issues. I’ve been into this project for so long, I would really love to receive feedback from fresh eyes like you.

So here are my questions :

What do you understand of the story being told in the video clip? If you could resume with a few sentences of what you understood that would help me a lot to know if I reached my target. On this subject I’m hesitating to add text introduction and outro, that’s why I’m asking this question to you.
Did you find a specific part of the video clip to be boring or too fast?

Your answer would help me a lot, so thank you in advance if you took the time to answer!

Without further ado, here is the current version of the video clip !

If you have any other comments, questions, or whatever, don’t hesitate to leave a comment in this thread. On my side, I will collect more feedback from friends and colleagues in the following day and improve transitions, 2D effects and re-render some clips based on the feedback I receive.

Ho and I asked myself if you wanted to see another video clip we did in the same universe as this one. It wasn’t done in Blender but UE4 and it’s a cool mix of 3D and actual real footage, a bit like a virtual production. Let me know !

Thanks for reading and have a good week-end !