PRODUCER / ASSISTANT DIRECTOR / COMPOSITING

My primary role in this video was compositing all the space elements into one unified image. Joe Baughman created different assets (such as animated spaceships, meteors spinning, the “pilots”, etc.) and I developed nebulas and stars racing through space and determined which were the most appropriate bits of animation to use for every element and where to place them in the shot. When trying to figure out what to do for a cool image for blowing up asteroids (something Joe had not animated and for which he gave me free reign) I came up with this 8-bit video game destruction animation. From that I then decided to have the shots inside the green “portal” also look 8-bit. And following that minor decision, I was inspired to maintain that aesthetic for the end credit animation sequence, with Joe contributing that wonderful 8-bit composition of the song playing over top–which is now, ironically, my favorite part of the video.

Random Notes:

• Small detail (that Joe came up with) that many may miss is that for the ships themselves, he used green clay for the windshields which I used as a greenscreen to matte out and insert the characters inside. But instead of totally comping out the green clay, I used a blending mode so that you can still see the outlines of the fingerprints, as if they had formed the “glass windshield” of the ships. They also serve to add a little bit of parallax to the ships’ vibrations.