For my final project, my main idea involved taking music and creating my own visual interpretation of it. Creating visuals for songs is something I enjoy greatly, so it seemed like a natural choice for this final project. The end product is something that I'm very proud of, and I'm very glad that I took on this video project, even with the short time there was to do it.
I had initially been deciding between creating a visual for a song made by my brother, or for the song 'Moon' by Kanye West. After juggling between the ideas, I decided to work on the Kanye West song, mainly because I felt that I could capture the feeling of the song better due to the lyrical content as well as taking inspiration from Kanye's own aesthetic.
The aesthetic for this video that I wanted to capture focuses on masked characters, much like what Kanye has been going for in this recent rollout for his new album, "DONDA." I took inspiration from these two outfits to create a Kanye-like character to use in the video.
The outfit was created in Marvelous Designer, a 3D clothing simulation tool that I use to create different types of clothing. The program allows you to "sew" fabrics into clothing, and I used this program to create all the clothing seen in the video. The pics above are the first iteration of the Kanye outfit (left) and the final look. with a much puffier and bulkier jacket (right). Because I didn't want to lean too much into one inspiration and also wanted to go for a mainly black theme, I retextured the clothing in Cinema4D to be black, creating what I found to be the perfect fit for my video.
Alongside this character, I created a masked, hooded character that I would later use in a crowd scene for the video.
Once I had these pieces, I wanted to create another "main character" to focus the video around, specifically to use in space scenes. I wanted to create a balance between showing the Kanye character and the second main character; I feel that too much screen time for one character would make the character lose its appeal. I also felt that Kanye didn't fit well into a space scene, at least for the direction that I had for the video.
I created this helmeted character to use in the space scene. I wanted to keep him masked as well, in order to fit the aesthetic of the video, and also because I'm not great at working with facial expressions yet. I would also retexture the clothing in Cinema4D for an all black look.
For the helmet character scenes, I wanted to focus on two main scenes; one being the introduction where the character is on Earth looking up at the moon, and the other being the character floating alone in space next to the moon. Because the character is wearing a racing helmet, I created the intro scene with a sports car to match with his look.
This scene then transitions into the space scene, where the character is now floating alone in space, with multiple angles capturing this weightless, empty feeling.
To accompany these space scenes, I created another scene with an old school TV floating throughout the scene. On this screen is the lyrics to the song. I created a separate video in After Effects using text, a radio waves effect, a VHS style effect, and a lower framerate (15FPS) to create this old footage style that would fit the TV model. I then rendered it out and applied it as a texture on the TV screen model.
This scene was the longest piece to render (around 14 hours), since it lasted the entire song length.
For Kanye's scenes, I focused on a minimalistic look inspired by James Turrell, an artist who works with light and shapes in really interesting ways. My original look for this scene was extremely saturated, and I found that desaturating in After Effects looked much better compared to removing the color from the lights in the Cinema4D scene. I'm unsure why, but I'm guessing it has to do with light behavior.
I also created another Turrell-inspired scene utilizing volumetric lighting, which is something I've always loved working with in Cinema4D.
Alongside these scenes, I then created the group scene with all of the hooded characters surrounding Kanye. I believe there are around 100 characters in this scene. I created render instances of the hooded character, which allows for me to put a huge number of models into the scene without exploding my computer. I'm not sure how to explain the way that render instances work, but I won't question it!
I was really happy with how these scenes turned out; it gives off this very mysterious, otherworldly feel, almost as if I shouldn't be seeing what's happening in this room surrounded by masked characters. It's also a very simple scene in terms of what needs to be rendered; there aren't any special textures or high-poly models present in the scene, yet it still looks very eye catching. This simplicity is what I needed to focus on for the entirety of this project; I wouldn't have been able to complete a video if it contained super complex, high-poly and 8K textured scenes. For example, the moon scenes are really just a character and a sphere with a moon texture.
With all these scenes figured out, I rendered a bunch of shots with differences in animation, camera position/angles, objects in scene, etc. My process mainly involved creating "shots" during the day, then rendering them overnight, which lasted for about a week. On the last couple days, I brought all the scenes in After Effects, brought in every shot, and then sculpted the video from what I had rendered. I used a few post processing effects, like glow and noise, as well as a color grade for the final product.
As I stated earlier, I'm really glad that I chose a project like this to work on. I normally do works like this in a couple months time, mainly because I can get very lazy, but also because I tend to hit creative blocks along the road especially if I give myself too much time. Having a pretty tight time restraint for this project really helped me to be better at generating ideas, as well as adapting to a tight turnaround time by optimizing my scenes and workflow. This project really taught me a lot, and I hope that this documentation helps to walk you through this whole process.
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