I love music videos, so I was quite excited when I was given the opportunity to produce one. The result was the computer animated, three minute promo for the song “Let’s Get Married” by Missouri, a band from Hamburg, Germany. I made the video over the course of about two months until the end of January 2004.
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The song “Let’s Get Married” by Missouri is about unrequited love and the strong belief of the protagonist that he would a the better coice than his love’s current partner.
The computer animated video shows how the protagonist confesses his love in a rather unusual way.
It is the result of a one-man-tour-de-force: I had about eight weeks, not only to produce the video but also to learn the required techniques - the video contains my first rigs, walk-cycles or bluescreen keys ever.
Therefore the whole video had to be based on an idea that is easy to implement and yet looking reasonably good. That’s how the city made of wooden building bricks came into being, complete with brick-people who have the musician’s faces.
First the basic types of bricks had to be extracted from childhood memories and were then modeled and assembled into buildings. Later, these were arranged to form a city. The figures consisted of smaller blocks and I tried to use as few as possible while still keeping the figures’ main characteristics recognizable.
During the modeling phase (i.e. at the beginning of the project) I invited the band to a studio with bluescreen where I filmed everyone’s face and sides. The poor singer had to sing his songs six times in a row without even moving his head.
Later, with the compositing-software the faces were freed from their blue background and put on the bricks as animated textures. The wood grain on the other hand was generated procedurally - once again to save time.
I also tried to keep the lighting of the scene most efficient. All of the almost 60 shots use the same set-up of lights. Only six lights suffice for the afternoon mood, helped by the computer generated sky and the relatively sharp shadows.
The video was produced in December 2003 and January 2004. I0 started rigging just before Christmas and began with the animation after the holidays. I followed a loose storyboard for the first two minutes while the final third of the video is more like a ‘targeted collage’. In this last part the protagonist changes into the role of the creator of his own world - with a surprising result.
Once a scene was animated it was queued for rendering in the background while I continued to animate the remaining scenes. To keep the amount of work managable, animtations were repeated very often and the story is now mostly told through camera angles and the editing.
The rendered video was edited in PAL 16:9, colour-corrected and bleached a little bit. Finally some artificial film grain helps to roughen the otherwise clean computer graphics look.
