The Bast “Give me strength” video is now released in colour!
ANIMATION
12 posts
Heres the video I´ve been working on for a few months
Im working on a mixed stop motion / live action / CGI pop video for the Swedish darkwave band Bast.
Although the original idea was to produce and animate a creature, that lurks in some wet murky water, it expanded (exponentially- as my ideas tend to) into including a band shoot in an underground disused bomb shelter, filming my grand-daughter Lona walking ina. corridor in Nesoddparken, and the 3d scanning some of the above and building a 3d modelled version in Blender.
Elements in the video:
The turkish bath.
As the song has a slightly ethnic, or turkish scale in it I got to thinking about the creature living in an old abandoned Turkish Bath, so I built one.
The creature.
Experimenting with casting and latex is new for me.
3D Scanning
Although I have played with this technique before, it was fun scanning a real sized corridor that Lona walks down, and also my word and plaster model of the Bath House, and then getting them to stick together in Blender. This enabled me to design “flythrus” in blender.
Later I even scanned Lona, and I’m currently learning to rig and skin her, so she can also appear in this environment.
Stop motion.
Animating the monster is turning out to be extremely difficult and slow, and more worryingly, Im not certain the “bath” will hold. It will be over 100 liters of water, which might be “too much” for the plastic Ikea box. In fact it sprang a leak, and in just a few minutes there was water all over the place. So, shooting as much as I can without water first.
Finally I can reveal the thing I spent a month on last year. All made from paper cut-out models, in my studio in #nesodden norway.
Thanks to Brian and Rocky for the opportunity, and my step daughter Kamilla for assisting. Lots of little “making of” clips are up on my instagram
https://www.instagram.com/markfrancombe
I have just about come to the end of making a promo film for the song “Telling Lies” for the US band The Fashion Focus.
The film is all stop motion, made from printed out paper models.
It took about 8 times longer than the budget, but was worth it to have a real paying project to work on using “The Machine”.
The nice thing to discover was how great it was to work on the machine for such an extended period. Only once did something not work and it turned out one drive belt had come loose. It will be interesting to find out if this is a typical issue, maybe I need to tighten all the belt before a shoot starts. Although Brian from the band my have his on meaning behind the song in his lyrics. I interpreted what I heard, and he was happy with the concept that he be seen as some kind of sinister, “Big Brother” type leader on the TV screens in living rooms. Of course I am referencing that everyone is sucked in by all the information coming from one source, that they have themselves invited into their own homes, The mobile phone. But we go back a few years and use the TV, the big precursor to the internet. On every screen, in many family rooms the same message is delivered, until, we peek outside and find the same screens have now multiplied to be on every building. A secondary theme is the quick cuts of the little paper truck who appears to be rushing through the empty street, the single lonely voice, who takes us to the nightmarish conclusion into a dream world, where hundreds of people are standing blankly staring at white walls. The bland and brainwashed. As part of the concept, the shots of the people were all created by using that lazy new technology of AI, itself another type of lies, that the world needs to be aware of from now on. Its incredible to think that.. thats it now, no going back, no-one can believe a thing they see or read. Maybe its a good thing, maybe the skepticism AI has created, had ended the rule of the big TV and media companies who purported to be telling the truth. Now we know they are not.
I think its a shame though.
After 4 weeks we added a little push to the sales of the Peel Session by “releasing” Dada 331. I had been working on the video for a while. It had not been a very easy process. First, Nick had found the master tapes from the Paradiso show in his loft and took them to Manchester where he had a friend who had taken his old Betacam machine off him, and proceeded to transfer all the stuff for me. He did everything, all the camera angles from that gig, some behind the scenes stuff, and he also had all the rushed to all the pop promos I made for Cranes. Inescapable, Adoration, I hope, and Tomorrow’s Tears. When back in Winchester he started to un the lot thru the Topas upscaling program and sending me bit and bobs. Meanwhile I had got the lyrics for Dada 331 from Alison and started animating them on “The Machine”.
And it went so well and was SO MUCH FUN! I was so please with this, I have been wondering that when I ever really got around to working on the machine (instead of building it, and tweaking it and fixing it) that maybe it was really boring, or did not work well. I have to say I haven’t had so much fun or been so content in myself as when I was working with this. I didnt even do it right the first time and had to worried of annoyance tin doing it again. See my idea was to cut out all the letter sand just animating them in and maybe out again in maybe ways. Of course this could have been done in After Effects, that that is just such a horrible program to work in, I’m always fighting it. Everything looks so so smooth and fake. You always have to pay attention to easing things or using wiggle plugin to make anything seem charming or not like Powerpoint. Anyway, first I printed all the letters out and animated them on my desk. That is white paper on black background. (See the video above) That was the mistake. When i looked at it over the footage of us playing it looked PUNK! Very cool, but not very Cranes! That damn Jamie Reid, no no-one can do it. Anyway some of that stuff stayed in, but most of it I redid, white on white but with the edges of the paper pieces sometimes showing. Looked great.
the rest of it was really just a jgsaw puzzle, some stuff downloaded from Archive.org… god I love that site… who needs Netflix?
The video was launched on the Cranes YouTube channel on April 5th.
I thought Id give the current trend of using AI to make images a go. I want as much inspiration for my film “Tales from the Towers” as possible. These came out quite well I think.
I just stumbled across this old but good series on hand-making armatures.
I wrote to the author and he was so surprised but delighted that I was interested. He gave me full permission to re-print it here. Thanks Charles
He even came back to me later to say…
Just found this (attached photo of armatures) last evening, and thought you might think it’s funny. This is where my armature making abruptly stopped, with these 5 poor limbless armatures.
So on what would have been my Dads 85th birthday, I finally finished and got working the Mo Co system.
Still a few tweaks to go, but here’s the very first test, thanks to Ulf for filming!