Behind the Scenes of Houdini

So here I am in my Grade 11 Animation class preparing for my final project. I knew that I wanted to make another music video, Viva La Vida showed me how rewarding that sort of project could be. Viva was a lot of fun to film (despite its ridiculous timeframe) and ended up becoming my most successful video. My first idea was to make a video for Foster the People's Helena Beat. I actually animated the first 30 seconds or so, at which point I realized I was a bit too limited with my resources to create the video that I wanted. Project=Scrapped. Shortly after I got hooked on Houdini by the same band. "Oh baby, this here is some fine ass music," was my first reaction. "Oh baby, this here is some fine ass music," was my second reaction, too. Anyway, I decided to go with that song. Around the same time, the band released their video for the song, which I thought was pretty fantastic. My music video for Houdini is a bit of a spin off of the original. What would the music video they were filming look like if it was finished... and was made with LEGO bricks? You know how the rest goes.

I wanted to make the video crazy energetic, and one of the important components of that was the camerawork. Because I use a DSLR, camera movements are a bit more challenging, as the camera is significantly heavier than my old T3i. My first attempt at dollying for this video was with a large track that my school had built beforehand. The picture above was taken during the filming of the shot at 0:30 in the video. This dolly track performed reasonably well, though I felt like I should try something else.

Behold, a LEGO dolly track. This was a night's work, and was used for many of the dolly shots for the first half of the video. The top half of the rig is detachable and could theoretically be placed on different rigs, allowing for a large range of possible camera movements. Unfortunately, no other compatible rigs were created. Still, this rig worked wonders.

And here it is in action. I rested the 2x4 on a desk, and then raised the actual set on a computer. This system took a while to set up, but it consistently produced quality results.

School ended and I only had a minute and a half completed. Hardly a music video. I took the set home but totally screwed up the move. Anyway, now it's summer.

Production at home was pretty much the same, except now I could animate as long as I wanted to. At school I had an hour and fifteen minutes every day (and then VFX at home), but now I could animate FOREVER.

An important thing to note is the floor in my studio *cough* bedroom *cough*. It's a nice smooth wooden floor, so all I had to do to make camera movements more accessible was tack on some furniture pads to my tripod. A couple 2x4s as guides and I had a super cheap, super effective camera dolly system. For more advanced camera movements, I removed the 2x4s and shifted the tripod around manually, judging the motion by eye. Tricky, but it worked really well.

Wooooo.

I broke out the Bionicles for the ending scenes. I wanted the characters to be able to fly around with a limitless range, so the ball-joint combo present in the Bionicle lineup worked perfectly. I hot glued a 1x1 plate onto the back of the characters so that the rig could be attached. There was a lot of masking to do, but the end result was fantastic. WELL I THINK SO.

Look at all of that. SO MUCH MASKING. That shot took three hours to animate. I got two seconds out of it.


So after five months- several hundred hours, I had completed my music video for Foster the People's Houdini. Yeah, man.