Music video for the song "Jaded" taken from the Amber Lamps second EP "Two", which is available on Spotify (listen here: https://open.spotify.com/album/07sGwO9HiV8RXBSzepRFhc) and on all streaming platforms.
Background
I had been wanting to make another music video for a while, but Covid-19 had struck and we were in lockdown. So I took the opportunity to develop my Blender skills and had the thought of creating a video for a song off The Amber Lamps recently released EP "Two". I sent my idea to the band as a rough treatment with screenshots rendered out in Evee and they liked it, so it was full steam ahead...
Concept
After listening to all the tracks on the EP, the one which brought images to my mind was "Jaded". It made me think of someone living in a world where everyone is the same and they all have mundane jobs that they repeat day after day after day. Then just by chance, this person sees an advert for The Amber Lamps on their way home. Researching the band shows a new purpose to life and our character breaks the mold and decides to spread the message to the rest the workers before riding off in to the sunset on their newly built motor cycle.
Production
It didn't take me long to realise that animating a flesh and blood character would take an enormous amount of time - and character animation is an amazing skill that I just don't posses. So, I decided on using androids and came across the amazing MT-103 Droid rig from Oliver Simonnet. Other models I found for free on sites such as:
Some models and textures I built myself, but only the simple ones. Modeling is probably my least favourite part, as it is so time consuming. I spent many hours modeling the road closed sign, and it's only on screen for a few seconds at most. I did get to discover some excellent new music while working on it though (check out the band Dirty Shirley - I had their album on a loop).
I roughed out the animation and generated a viewport render to use for timing with the song. Editing the shot lengths to fit with the song ensured I would not be animating or rendering any more frames than necessary.
After weeks of creating the sets, animating and lighting the scenes, I generated the video using the Evee real time renderer and was pleased with the results.
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| Frame from the PreViz rendered using Evee |
Then I thought I'd render a single frame using the Cycles raytracing engine just to see how it looked. I remember watching it slowly built up in front of my eyes and couldn't believe how much better it was!
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| Frame from final video rendered using Cycles |
So I was hooked on Cycles and spent the next few weeks optimising the scenes and rendering out the final image sequences. Once complete, I imported them to Davinci Resolve, applied a slight grade, added the audio and rendered out the finished video.
Equipment Used
Laptop (Gigabyte Aero with 16GB RAM, NVidia Geforce GTX 1060 6GB)
Software Used
Blender (v2.8 - v3), Davinci Resolve, Affinity Photo (for texturing)
My Roles
Video Concept, Animator, 3D Modeling, Editor
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