Research Project: Object Metamorphosis and Transformations
Fani Vassiadi
MA Digital Effects
NCCA, Bournemouth University
| Introduction | The theory | The practice | My approach | Conclusion | References |
This music video clip started about a month ago to be shown everywhere! Atlantic Records informed me that Joseph Kahn was the director but no other information could be provided. Even though I tried to include an interview for that video, I finally only managed to find an article with a very interesting link to a video that shows some shots before and after the compositing.
Rob Thomas video clip “Lonely No More”
(article found at: http://www.cgfocus.com/NewsDetails.cfm?NewsID=1594)
KromA Helps Rob Thomas Find a Cure for Loneliness
By
Jean-Francois Lepage
April 18, 2005
CG News
Studio Puts Singer into Topsy Turvy CG World
Los Angeles—KromA built Rob Thomas a room with a groove for the former Matchbox Twenty singer’s debut video as a solo artist Lonely No More. The animation and visual effects studio placed Thomas inside a series of CG rooms that flip, turn and change form around him as he performs. The clip includes nearly 250 visual effects shots that seamlessly weave scores of 3D and practical elements to dizzying effect.
The first release from Thomas’ album Something to Be on Melisma/Atlantic, Lonely No More opens with the singer seated on a bed in a modern apartment overlooking a city. As he sings, lamps, plants and other objects in the room begin spinning around and changing shape. A moment later, the whole room flips and Thomas is in a nightclub filled with people. Wall panels rotate. Chairs and beds turn flips. The room continues to rotate and switch between the nightclub and apartment. Pacing and energy continue to build with Thomas knocking down walls and tossing furniture in the air until it all comes to an end—the room neatly folding itself up and disappearing as Thomas walks away.
Thomas, the people in the nightclub and a few of the furniture elements were shot against green screen. Everything else seen in the video is CG, produced by KromA’s animation team. CG artists built all of the sets—there are four basic “rooms” in the video—after sketches provided by a production designer, as well as the myriad of props and furniture employed in the topsy-turvy illusion.
“For the video to work, the rooms had to appear to be practical locations and the objects in them had to be photo-real, otherwise it would have looked like a cartoon,” said KromA visual effects supervisor Bert Yukich. “After the animators built and textured the rooms, we pulled them into the Avid DS and color corrected them to set a look and match the practical elements. We also had to relight and color correct a lot of the film elements to blend into their surroundings. We wanted it to be impossible to tell what is real and what is not.”
With nearly 250 visual effects shots, many involving dozens of layers and multiple animated elements, the project was intensive in every respect. KromA compositors Evan Guidera and Adam Fisher spent seven days just in preparing matte elements. “Many elements had to be rotoscoped and cleaned up. Light flares and rigging had to be removed,” Yukich explained. “Additional rotoscoping had to be done where practical furniture had to be replaced with CG elements. We had 20 or 30 shots like that.”
Yukich performed the compositing work on an Avid DS, placing Thomas and the other talent into the artificial rooms and animating the 3D objects to create the transformations. He made the rooms flip through artificial camera moves. The actual transitions from the apartment to the nightclub were done with match cuts that happen so fast, viewers don’t have time to spot the switch. “The flips were very complicated because the furniture in the room needed to react naturally to gravity, sliding across the floor or tumbling through the air and bumping into things,” Yukich said.
In the early scenes in the clip, the spinning transformations occur one at a time, but as it proceeds, multiple objects begin to rearrange themselves simultaneously. At the peak of the nightclub scene, it appears that every object in the room is in motion and altering its appearance. All of this action is tightly choreographed so that it seems to be responding to the rhythm of the music. “The flips and twists are motivated by the music,” explained Yukich. “At one point buildings seen through the windows in the background are moving up and down in time to the beat.”
Here is the video of before and after compositing: http://www.kroma.biz/html/robBNA.html