Airglow Music Video Concept
Disclaimer: The original song, Airglow, is by Laszlo. This intellectual property belongs completely to the artist and record label, Monstercat. I am in NO way affiliated with either the artist or a label. This production is completely unsolicited and I am in no way receiving any promotion or compensation. This is purely a fan project with no official support or contract.
A recent trend in electronic art is the nostalgic vaporwave aesthetic. This trend can be observed in music as well, as similar genres such as synthwave, and lo-fi hip hop. Around the fall of 2016, the artist Laszlo released a track on the EDM label Monstercat, Airglow. Upon listening to it, I fell in love immediately, and knew right away I wanted to make some sort of graphical tribute I could also turn in as a project for university. Although it took some time to finalize the concept, here is a break and presentation of my work!
In this project, Matt Wringer and I worked together to create a cool synthwave cinematic! While we wanted to do the full video, we simply did not have the time. This did not deter us from
still breaking down the project into more manageable scenes and going from there, however. We worked on making an intro for the first 35ish seconds of the song, mostly to hit
the minimum requirements of the project, but to really set the mood for my vision for the video as a whole.
I definitely took more of a directorial role at first, really laying down the foundation for what I thought would be fun. Matt and I had a bit of back and forth but communication was very
sparse in the beginning of the project. I talked with both Matt Wallace and Esteban Garcia for more inspiration and some tips on different little tweaks and looks they would
do for an art style that is similar. I mostly listened to the song the first few weeks, while doing some concept work. No solid concepts, really just ideas.
I finally took to starting my concepts in blender. Around this time I was also exploring cinema 4d for its prowess in motion graphics. Blender was used in the beginning stages as this is the
package I am most familiar with! The final models for the environment and ship (not the background) used were actually all done in blender. From here I experimented with the
"Freestyle" stroke render within blender, and worked in Nuke and After Effects to develop a glowly look, with noise added to solidify the analogue concept. Around this time I talked with
Esteban, and he showed me a few clips of one of his projects, "Infinite Sun", and explained his process and some of the tools he used. It was almost all done analog with old school
video mixers and synths to create a truly vintage, classic feeling look to his project. I knew I had to do the same, and he graciously allowed my partner and I to work in his studio! From here I went into cinema 4d with concept assets and threw together a short animation to acquaint myself with the animation in cinema 4d, as well as to further solidify the look and pipeline.
After Effects was used for simply glowing, noise, and grading, with final frames being thrown together in premier.
As I moved more into production, a good friend of mine (Drew Sumner) introduced me to a camera asset/plugin called FMCR. This tool was a camera with added null objects to make
animation with cameras far more natural, and easy to use than what was baked in by default. After a couple hours, I was able to get a nifty little ship animation going, and this is
largely the same as what was used for the final result. The tricky part was getting the trail to work. I ended adding this functionality through a material applied to a circle that
was swept through a tracer object. An alpha gradient was used to have the fade off. It needs more tweaking to be perfect, but it is definitely usable. For the second part, after setting up the animation I knew I needed more than just a grid to really make the project fit in with its theme. I was introduced to jsplacement, again by the wonderful Drew Sumner, and went to town generating crazy displacement maps, and combining them in photoshop. 3 unique grids were used, and simple planes were displaced with the resulting maps
I struggled getting rendering work properly. While I hit the look fine some frames simply had way too high of a render time. Sketch and Toon was used with the default render in
Cinema 4D to get the look. No lighting was used, as the lines traced were glowing. Green in the background was added in after effects, while I could have used alpha, I really
wanted artifacts introduced by the mixing console, so green was keyed out, and then the resulting video from the console was digitized and the background was added over to sync properly.
