“Hollywood Holiday” – Love Me Butch Music Video

[Chris Smith]

Extremely Cool.

Questions:

1. Was the footage of the band shot motion control or tracked? Or were they sepearate planes in 3D space and the parallax change was just the AE camera moving?

2. The Rhinos. Did you guys do the animation? If so was the camera data shared between the 3D app and AE. Or was it a “Locked” cam in 3D and the rhino layer is simply in AE 3D space and the AE cam does the movement?

3. What was your methods of doing layer reveals? Masks? Ink spill footage? Hand paint?

4. Your methods for the text write-ons? AE Write-on or AE Stroke? Other?

5. Bird Flocks, Dust, B&W discs…Particular?

6. The roses growing looks more authentic than just a mask reveal. Technique? Actual timelapse? Hand animation? Maya Paint Effects?

7. Trees and Building growth technique?

8. What was the hardest, most rewarding element in this project?

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Andrei Firtich]

AWESOME video. After watching it the second time, I like it more & more, incredible composite job, I started diging the song too. Couple questions, was it all done by manual tracking or did you use Synth Eyes 3d or its equvelents? What 3d app was used in rendering and was any of 3d lines done with 3d stroke. Thanks for posting the video

[Ron Lindeboom]

Hello Alvin,

Nice work, man. Excellent use of AE’s 3D layers and any video with cows in it — even for just a moment towards the front — has got to be a real winner. Well, at least Cowdog just said so and he wouldn’t lie.

How long did you guys work on that one?

How would you like to be a guest on the Cow’s AE podcast and talk a bit about how this was done?

Best always,

Ron Lindeboom

[Alvin Seah]

Hi Ron,

Thanks! hehehe.. we love cows 🙂

We took about a month to complete the video.

AE Podcast? Sure, it’ll be an honour. How does it work?

Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com

[Alvin Seah]

Hi firtich,

Thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed the video 🙂

All tracking was done with AE’s Motion Tracker tool.
The 3D elements was done with Maya and yes, towards the end of the video there is one scene containing 3D Stroke.

Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com

[Alvin Seah]

Hi Chris,

Thanks. You’ve got some pretty good stuff at Sugar too 🙂
I’ll try my best to answer your questions.

1. Was the footage of the band shot motion control or tracked? Or were they sepearate planes in 3D space and the parallax change was just the AE camera moving?

Most of the band footages were seperate planes in 3D space. There are some shots which were motion tracked. But the majority for the animation were created by the AE camera movements.

2. The Rhinos. Did you guys do the animation? If so was the camera data shared between the 3D app and AE. Or was it a “Locked” cam in 3D and the rhino layer is simply in AE 3D space and the AE cam does the movement?

The rhinos and all the other animals were animated and rendered in Maya, then placed in AE as a 3D layer. And yes, it is the AE camera which does the movement.

3. What was your methods of doing layer reveals? Masks? Ink spill footage? Hand paint?

It’s a combination of masks and ink spill footages.

4. Your methods for the text write-ons? AE Write-on or AE Stroke? Other?

It’s the good ol’ AE Write-on. Thanks to many tutorials available here on that.

5. Bird Flocks, Dust, B&W discs…Particular?

Yup.

6. The roses growing looks more authentic than just a mask reveal. Technique? Actual timelapse? Hand animation? Maya Paint Effects?

Each petal was animated manually in Maya. No shortcuts 🙂

7. Trees and Building growth technique?

That was Maya Paint Effects.

8. What was the hardest, most rewarding element in this project?

Getting together as different individuals, leaving our differences behind, tolerating each other, fighting with each other, laughing and crying. It was an emotional journey. Friends – that’s the most rewarding element in this project. 🙂

Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com

[Chris Smith]

Fantastic, Alvin. Thanks for that info. It goes to show that great work like your video is not so much “magic tricks” as it is great design, planning, and a lot of manual labor 😉

[Alvin Seah] “Thanks. You’ve got some pretty good stuff at Sugar too :)”

Thank you.

Is the building paint effects the prest buildings that came with Maya 6? Did you animate the growth functions to achieve their growth or was it more in-depth than that?

I take it you modeled a rose and like you said, hand animated each petal?

Would you say that the majority of the work was in AE where as 3D (Maya) was more of a support function to generate certain elements?

On your website is other great stuff. Like the video you did for Ahli Fiqir. Was that primarily AE?

Even the building walls shifting and the whole house collapsing into a book?

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Alvin Seah]

Hi Chris,

I hope my answers are useful to you 🙂

[Chris Smith] “Is the building paint effects the prest buildings that came with Maya 6? Did you animate the growth functions to achieve their growth or was it more in-depth than that?”

Yup, it is Paint Effects. It was just keyframing the growth functions.

[Chris Smith] “I take it you modeled a rose and like you said, hand animated each petal?”

Yup.

[Chris Smith] “Would you say that the majority of the work was in AE where as 3D (Maya) was more of a support function to generate certain elements?”

Yes, that’s right.

[Chris Smith] “On your website is other great stuff. Like the video you did for Ahli Fiqir. Was that primarily AE?

Even the building walls shifting and the whole house collapsing into a book?”

AF was done primarily in AE like LMB. The shifting walls and collapsing house was done in 3D.

Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com

[Chris Smith]

As long as your being generous with your answers, I have a few more 🙂 A lot of posters here ask quite often how to do many of the techniques that are in your project, so I’m asking for myself and for others to learn from.

How was the design and technical approach? Did you guys plan on a look before hand, think of the elements you want then assign them to each member in some fashion? Or did each person say work on their own elements and they were all placed together in AE to see how they worked together? What I mean, was: Was it designed very specifically from the front end or was there a lot of experimentation?

Like at what point do you say we need rhinos and giraffes for example? Or was that something somebody was working on and you guys incorporated it into the project?

Does each person have their own specialty? Like one person is the Maya person, the AE person, or the PS and Illustrator person?

What inspires the things in the composition? Do you guys create or find photographs you like, mask them out them throw them in the mix?

What was the camera animation approach? Did you actually animate the AE cam or were all the objects parented to a common layer and moved past the cam?

It seems the video is broken down into sections (as opposed to one loooong comp). Is this so? And how did you decide what defines a sequence? Did you create the cam moves first, then fill the scene, or set some key elements, then animate the cam?

The Background layer(s): Was it in 3D space as well or did you keep it in 2D so it was always there despite how the camera moved?

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Alvin Seah]

No problem, Chris. Keep asking 🙂

[Chris Smith] “How was the design and technical approach? Did you guys plan on a look before hand, think of the elements you want then assign them to each member in some fashion? Or did each person say work on their own elements and they were all placed together in AE to see how they worked together? What I mean, was: Was it designed very specifically from the front end or was there a lot of experimentation?”

A little bit of both. A certain amount of planning was done to layout the structure of the video. This is to ensure that everyone stays on the right track and not fly too far. The art direction and the tying elements were pre-determined so that there will be uniformity throughout the video. And the rest is just experimentation. A lot of things didn’t turn out like how we planned, but they still looked good. We had to constantly communicate during the process so that we know what each of us are up to. Some of us didn’t exactly follow the plan but we accomodated and worked around it. I guess there is no right or wrong way to do this, as long as it is efficient and it works 🙂

[Chris Smith] “Like at what point do you say we need rhinos and giraffes for example? Or was that something somebody was working on and you guys incorporated it into the project?”

It was a last minute decision. Someone did some animal animations before but they were never used, so we decided to adapt it into the video as an enhancement.

[Chris Smith] “Does each person have their own specialty? Like one person is the Maya person, the AE person, or the PS and Illustrator person?”

There is one Maya person and the rest are all AE + PS + AI people.

[Chris Smith] “What inspires the things in the composition? Do you guys create or find photographs you like, mask them out them throw them in the mix?”

We listened to the song as asked ourselves what we saw visually. Instead of analysing the lyrics, we tried to inject our personal emotions as visual statements into the video. Having that sketched out we then proceeded to look for references or photographs to illustrate the idea on the board. Some of the ideas were thrown in along the way. Some of them didn’t make it into the video. For example the Flying Stompboxes, it was inspired by one of the band’s t-shirt designs.

[Chris Smith] “What was the camera animation approach? Did you actually animate the AE cam or were all the objects parented to a common layer and moved past the cam?”

Depends on the scene. For the first chorus, the layers were parented and animated because the idea is to “morph/shift” from one shot to the other without doing much straight cuts. As for the second chorus, the AE cam was animated and everyone else basically stood in their own places. And the other parts were a little bit of both. I guess it really depends on the composition to determine which solution would be most efficient.

[Chris Smith] “It seems the video is broken down into sections (as opposed to one loooong comp). Is this so? And how did you decide what defines a sequence? Did you create the cam moves first, then fill the scene, or set some key elements, then animate the cam?”

Yes, it is broken down into sections, then broken down to even smaller sections, and even smaller sections, and so forth. Some of them are music dependant (lip-sync) and some are not. So we had to be careful when determining the timing of each scene and its flexibility. We’re all musicians or music lovers so there is a basic understanding of song-writing which we translate into the video. Things like crescendos, climaxes and anti-climaxes were identified in the song and simply re-enacted in the video according to our own vision. So according to the pace or mood of the part in the song, we decided how things are going come in and go out. Some key elements were set and then we animated the cam, then more elements were set and more cam animation and so forth. If it doesn’t work, we go back and readjust until we’re satisfied with the sequence. Once the flow is set, we fill in the supporting elements like the particles, lighting effects, smoke and what-nots.

[Chris Smith] “The Background layer(s): Was it in 3D space as well or did you keep it in 2D so it was always there despite how the camera moved?”

Now this is a tricky thing. If it is in 3D space, it has to be huge enough to cover the comp, but at the same time still look good at certain angles or close-ups. If it’s static 2D then it doesn’t gel with the 3D environment. Our solution was using a little of both. The background piece was 2D, but manually animated to interact with the cam movements and to match the composition. This serves as a useful secondary animation as other supporting elements like the sun-light flare could be parented onto it. Then there are layers of textures and colour gradients which just sit there as static 2D layers.

I hope that was useful. Most of the solutions I’ve shared were imagined and results of trial and error. Under the pressure of tight schedules, we were forced to come up with the most efficient solutions yet not compromising the quality and I think that’s the best way to learn 🙂

Love,
Alvin Seah @ HueVisualab.com