nonexistent video – the making of

So, I’ve been working on this video for a couple weeks and despite the small detail that I’m never satisfied with the results, this time I’m kinda proud of myself.
The idea behind “nonexistent” follows the main story of “beyond the universe”. At this point in time, basically at the end, Emily is mentally exhausted and lost in another universe. She is unable to understand the whens-hows-and-whys and so she just walks in a street, while returning back after visiting her “parallel” home in Montauk (where her parallel-boyfriend is sleeping with another parallel-woman).

The first hint that there is something strange going on is when she sees herself reflected in a shopping window as if the reflection is not actually hers: she stands still and the reflection yells and screams from behind the window.
Our dear Emily starts to run in horror and the more she goes on the more the reflections become unfamiliar until she finally realizes that… Ok go listen to the song and read the lyrics if you want to know why. 😛

Now, beside being a musician, I am also a designer and chief creative officer (aka/the guy who does weird thing with weird softwares while people goes “oooooh”) and I thought about creating a video animation to represent all of this.

Alas, I’m Adriano Taccoli and not Netflix, so my budget (money and time) is quite limited. So I came up with the idea of creating a low poly animation (I love low poly) in 3d, taking advantage of the minimalistic to avoid making things overcomplicated.

So here we go, using those weird softwares I’m familiar with such as: Unreal Engine, Cinema 4d, Maya, Photoshop, After effects etc, I started to create the street where Emily is supposed to walk. In a matter of 2 days I assembled a small town.

After that I needed to create our beloved main character… and that was literally a pain in… yes, there.
Rigging a 3d character may seem easy (or maybe it actually is) but for me it was a nightmare. Linking all the “virtual” bones to Emily took me almost 3 nights. Then, thankfully to Adobe Mixamo I managed to fix all the issues with a couple clicks (duh) and I started to import the motion capture files to simulate the walk-run-stop-look animations.

The rest was pretty much easy, I rendered all the animation’s frames (roughly 4800) and began the annoying post processing, which required further 10k renders to achieve the sketch + flipbook effect.

Funny fact: it took me 2 weeks to finish the video. It took me 2 hours to write the song. – Insert Facepalm emoji here –

Cheers,
Adr