Music Video Test Footage

 Music Video Testing

For my music video I want to utilise computer generated imagery to create impressive and interesting visuals/ scenarios that would be difficult with practical effects on no budget. To experiment with my current preferred song for my NEA I have created a 30 second test of a scene I would like to remake at a much higher standard if I were to continue with this current idea.

The test footage was created in an extremely short space of time, using many pre-existing assets sourced from the website Sketchfab. The 3D scenes were created in Blender, using the built in particle system to create the rough thruster effect. For performance reasons additional effects such as motion blur were not included while rendering and bloom was not present in certain shots. If I were to redo these shots I would make sure that all objects are highly detailed and that I am achieving a visually appealing end result rather than prioritising time like I did for this previsualisation (pre-vis).

To break up the shots of the main narrative of the video I will splice in footage of the music being played, similar to the music video for Aerosmith's 'I Don't Want to Miss a Thing'. For my test I recorded various angles of my friend Seth playing the guitar in his room. I turned the lights off and made his television screen only show the colour red so the only light casted on him would be the red light, creating a dark , gloomy atmosphere. I later on changed the colour of the shots in post in DaVinci Resolve by adjusting the Hue of the clips in the 'Color' tab.

Here is a screenshot of one of the shots of the rocket towards the beginning of the test in Blender. You came see the placement of the camera in the scene as well as the path that the rocket object is following. The view of the camera is visible in the window on the left. A small window displaying the rendered view of this shot can be seen below.

Here 

is a screenshot of the timeline for the edit of the test. I used multiple video tracks to make sure I could layer clips to easily adjust the duration of each clip so they would flow into each other better and align with the timings of the music.

To achieve the rough look of my face appearing in the astronaut's helmet I set up a model of an astronaut sitting in a cockpit I had previously modelled and applied a material to the visor part of the helmet that appeared a bright green. In DaVinci Resolve I then used the chroma key effect to select the green area of the helmet and make that region transparent allowing me to place the footage of my face in a layer below it, also placing a layer of a bronze texture between the helmet and face layer to replace the visor that was lost when given a different material and also help make the face look as if it belongs on the body better.

Intertextuality

• First person shot of looking around following a large white flash- similar to Assassins Creed (2007)
• The placeholder ship used for the alien ship is a star destroyer from the Star Wars original trilogy
• Shot of face in space helmet is similar to Dave Grohl in 'Next Year' by the Foo Fighters
• Rocket sequence shares similarities to the Apollo 11 launch