120
Render time Hours
410572800
Pixels
5940
frames
41.3
project File size GIGAbyte(s)
FIRST CONCEPT
The first concept for Afraid of Love was a pink scene with a camera moving vertically and rotating around cubes with the lyrics on the cubes. Two preview renders were done before the concept was thrown. The idea of a "3D" video was still there thus leading to the final concept of the reacting spheres.
preview render tests
When the first preview renders of the concept were finished I realized that the project would need a background, a background in which the camera would have to blur both in depth and in motion. Blurring is a very expensive effect and so the concept was thrown.
Final Concept
The idea of having reacting spheres was introduced some few days later after the project had begun. At this stage the idea for the lyrics was to do like I did in Tobu - You & I. The complication were that the background would not react to the camera movement of the lyrics, thus giving the video two point of views printed above each other.
Preview render
When the dynamics were set up in the lightning studio and the project was ready for rendering a new problem was introduced. The global illumination together with the ambient occlusion and the 4 multipasses; depth, shadow etc the render times for one frame reached around 1 minute +- 25 seconds. That meant that all the 5940 frames would take 100+ hours to render. With the time schedule I had that would cause problems.
Post production
In after effects I added the background, lyrics and basicly all effects except for the actual audio visualizer. In post I added light streaks and mapped them to the amplitude of certain frequencies. When I analyzed the soundtrack I realized that there was something very interesting with it. It was so calm yet so powerful. When the beat dropped there was so much power in the track that I had to create a way to make the video feel both calm and powerful.
FINAL
The night to the 24th February i had already been given 1 week of extra time, the render was still on that night. The final render. The morning of the 24th I sent the file to Toms and it was later uploaded to Youtube the same day. It had been one amazing journey to work for Tobu again, on his first album. I was given a gift by Tobu, a physical copy of his album Sugar. Today it stands next to my most precious items. It reminds me of why I love motion and graphic design, and the equal love people have for creative art in any form.
Project Details
This was my 11th project for Tobu and it had been just under 7 months since last time I worked for him. When Toms reached out to me I was filled with joy. It is, and always will be an honor to work for him.
Tobu (stylized as 7obu) is a music producer from Latvia.
http://www.7obu.com
http://www.youtube.com/tobuofficial
http://www.7obu.com
http://www.youtube.com/tobuofficial