Cutting Factory was given a task to produce a music video to go with an existing dance music track.
The track can be located here:
The first thing the team had to decide was what kind of music video? Should it be based on a performance? A random or abstract set of visual images? In the end, we settled on a trying to make a linear story to go with the general atmosphere of the music.
And we decided to do it by using a combination of real video for the environments and 3D Animation for the character.
STAGE 1:
The first stage was obviously to sketch out a storyline and we decided to produce one that showed a woman locked inside her own madness. A number of sketches were produced – far more than we actually needed.
STAGE 2:
Having made our selection, we laid them roughly over the audio track to see how they would flow.
STAGE 3:
Testing out the atmosphere: to do this, ie how “horrific” we should make it, we produced two flyposters and put one up in Berlin (where the video is set in terms of the environments), and one up in London, as well as posting them on Instagram and sending them out to people. The one that looked more like a horror film got the most traction.
STAGE 4:
Next stage was actually filming what we needed to film, and this was split into three distinct days:
DAY 1:
We had an environment in an apartment, and we had an actress, and we had a MoCap suit. Filming the actress in the suit allowed her movements to be captured for the animation, whilst keeping the environment real.
DAY 2:
We needed the time of the day when it was just beginning to turn dark, as well as rain. We got the timing just right, and we were lucky enough to get the rain! As the actress could not wear the MoCap suit outside due to the magnetic field of the passing trams, which would ruin the sensors, we filmed her in all the locations without it, as a reference, and got clean plates of the environments as well.
DAY 3:
She then went into a studio, wore the suit, and repeated the performance under the controlled environment.
Simultaneously, using the green screen, we had a lot of extras pretending to dance at the club where some of the scenes were set.
Our next stage will be to model and rig the character and we will post updates here when we have done it.