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Howard Gardner CG

Non-Bio: Believe

The aim of this project was to create a music video for Non-Bio featuring a mixture of live action and CGI visual effects, promoting a track from their album The Future Is Written. The project was a lower-priority effort compared to some other commissioned work I had at the time, so it took around four months to complete. I had complete creative control.

The footage was shot at various locations around South London using a Panasonic HC-V700 camera. The model meshes started out in 3D environments generated by Mandelbulb 3D software. This was exported as a series of OBJ files into Maya, where the mesh was cleaned up quite significantly, manipulated, UVed and surface textured. The motion tracking of the footage was done using SynthEyes and the 3D models were animated and rendered out using Mental Ray in a number of separate passes. Finally After Effects composited the layers together onto the backplate.

To create all the video glitch overlays and transitions I tortured an old battery-powered Spiderman TV game and captured the composite AV output; After Effects was used to edit together all the component shots and overlays.

The completed video

One of several models which I derived from OBJs exported out of Mandelbulb 3D. The voxel stack feature was useful for extracting meshes from the fractal environments, however they tended to be quite messy and needed extensive clean-up work once imported into Maya. The mouth was then modelled on from polygon primatives and photographic texture files were mapped to the surface to lend realism.

A closer look at some of the more noticeable CGI sequences, after the layers had been composited to the backplate but prior to colour grading or overlays.