GEORGE JORDAN: VFX & MG

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Colour schemes

imo it makes most sense to take the colour scheme from the album art when producing this, because it represents the visual and sonic theme of the album well. 

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The feel of the album:

The Midnight’s Tim McEwan tweeted when the album dropped that ““KIDS” is never wanting to grow up. It’s Peter Pan. It’s adventures on your bikes. It’s Saturday morning cartoons. It’s afternoons at the arcade while your parents are busy working two jobs to keep up with the empty promise of 80s capitalism. But you. You’re young. You’re free.”

This informs my colour and stylistic choices when producing the promo 

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specs

~20 seconds in length

Communicate the visual style and sonic feel of the album, ‘Kids’ by The Midnight.

Be rendered in a 4:5 aspect ratio, as to be rendered accurately on social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter. 25 FPS

Use a mix of 3D and 2D graphics created in Cinema4D and After Effects.

Use sound but not require it to catch a potential listener’s eye as promos like this are often viewed muted.

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idea

So I’ve decided to make a promo for the last album from The Midnight, which was called Kids. Next post will be me setting out the specifications that need to be met for me to call the project a success 

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Ideation

so while I did want to film something, I’ve decided that due to time constraints and lots of travel during the time available, that instead I’m going to do a retro-inspired 3D motion graphics sequence, probably to promote a song or album, although I’ve not chosen that yet. 

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FMP ideation

so today i’m starting to formulate what I want to do for my final major project. I know I want to mix filmed material with an intense graphic editing style. And because the whole piece has to be less than 90 seconds, I’m going to aim for 60. 

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Cinema

To make the camera move coherently I had to both pivot the camera down and raise it up. I was originally going to stop the animation at 6 seconds when the logo comes in but after trying that out found it made the background fairly stilted and boring so extended the animation to last the entire 10 seconds. 

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Cinema

The mountain the camera pivots around is just a basic landscape object. The most obnoxious part of this process as trying to line up the grid lines so they look contiguous with the ones on the floor. 

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Cinema

To create the grid effect I wanted for those retro vibes I added the Cel Renderer effect to the output. I originally had the colours the other way round but that didn’t match the visual feel I was trying to achieve so I flipped the lines to be light and the surfaces to be dark. 

I then added a plane to act as the floor for the camera and landscape to interact with 

Next was adding the Camera. This proved difficult originally because as far as I know there’s no easy way to keep a camera aligned to a plane, so I had to manually set it’s co-ords to 0 in the X and Y position axes. Because I was animating both the rotation and the Y position I just picked points that looked like reasonable starting locations and went from there. 

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Cinema

first thing to do is change these settings to be reasonable values because Cinema’s defaults 720p... 

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Channel

So I picked the channel, Five USA because they air American television programs like NCIS and Law and Order that evoke a feeling of programs like Miami Vice. Which dictated the style I went with for the project. The current branding also uses American flag iconography with the red colour and the stripes through the A. 

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Channel

So the channel i’ve opted to go with is “5 USA”. More on why I picked it later, but first, I’ve decided to rebrand the channel, so here’s the process I went through in designing the logo. Colours aren’t final yet. 

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Nuke 4

So obviously that didn’t work, the mov options box never showed up so I rendered at 24 fps... 

here we go *again*

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Nuke 3

Attempting to render nuke as a .mov, so I can import it back into AE to add the sound and then finally export it as a deliverable. 

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Audacity

I took a section of the Moog song, Before We Run into audacity and time reversed it, added distortion and compressed it to create a more glitchy effect for the audio. 

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Nuke 3

To create the “max headroom” look I used the “premultiply” section of the roto node to silhouette me onto the background, this had the added benefit of allowing me to roto out the box i was leaning on at the same time. 

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Nuke 2

Because I created the assets from frame 0 but I trimmed my comp in nuke, I had to offset the frames with these TimeOffset nodes.