MSTRKRFT - Work On You

To start off, here's the final product:

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25MB Quicktime Movie - May take a couple minutes to load up.

Designs

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MSTRKRFT & Last Gang Records contacted Mike White to create a music video for their single "Work On You" in early 2006. By April later that year preliminary production design had begun and by June the 3 min. 47 sec. video was complete. From concept to completion it was 11 weeks of production that was thoroughly enjoyed by all. It can be rare when a project comes along that inspires artists and animators to feel so passionately about a small piece of film. This website will show the behind the scenes artwork that was created to make this video into what it was.

Here's the schedule we made and miraculously followed perfectly, everyone involved worked incredibly hard to maintain the schedule, in the end we came under budget and had a massive party afterwards to screen the video and feed everyone mountains of food and booze.

First thing's first, it all starts with an idea.
The band members gave us total creative freedom. All they asked for was that we gave it a Transformers / Akira / Astroboy feel to it. This is all you need to say to most animators and they'll shit their pants thinking of this golden opportunity. JFK and Al-P guided us for story, a rough idea regarding robot lovers running into some trouble with a lot of the video taking place as a flash-back with that soap opera-style haze ala Daft Punk's Interstella 5555.

Story art and character designs sort of happened simultaneously. Derek, Jeff and Mike coordinated their efforts to hash out a very rough thumbnail version of the storyboards while drawing dozens of sketches to determine the final look of the main characters. Instead of doing a detailled and clean storyboard after the thumbnails, we cut an animatic with those scanned drawings and once timing was locked we went straight to character posing.

Derek & Jeff staged the shots and did character layout scene for scene on paper, clean and in full detail often rendering them with markers as a guide for the clean-up crew to eventually know where the highlights were in the chrome-like skin that the robots had.

A lot of research was made in order to capture the style we were looking for. Color was primarily Chad's job, before he began cleaning up animation scenes, him and Derek took a few days to create the color models for all the characters and props.

The characters went through several stages of refinement before being inked in Flash, the basic design was locked on paper early on when it was obvious that we wanted a golden chrome droid goddess for the female character, and a good guy version of the comic book style Megatron. It wasn't a far stretch for Derek and Jeff to create these characters with 80's action/sci-fi cartoons fresh in their minds.

The final DVD covers made for the client.

Promotional Art

Storyboard & Animatic

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Producing the rough storyboards took two weeks (another 3 weeks to 'clean' the boards into final key poses), even though it was only 3:47 in length, planning out each scene had to be done. We had to figure out the flow of every shot and how to convey each idea clearly, especially with most of the music video playing out as a 'flashback'.

These were small pencil & marker sketches on paper to get an idea of the composition. Then they got scanned and made into a leica reel in Flash. Afterwards, detailled scene by scene staging and posing started being drawn out as the character models were being revised, cleaned and painted.

Some panels were cut for time, but pacing out the animatic took a couple days, lining up some beats to the music and editing the artwork to fit length of the soundtrack, this was the final result.

Layout

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With the thumbnail boards being very rough and time running out before animation and backgrounds had to get started, poses got drawn out on paper with pencils and markers, giving accurate key drawings for the animators to reference for character position, posture, expression, highlights, shadows and action direction.

Background Art

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Location designs can always be challenging, it wasn't necessarily supposed to be a setting on Earth or Cybertron, but rather it could be open to any interpretation. Obviously a hi-tech futuristic world had to be created from scratch, but our main characters had to speed away in an old classic Chevy Nova too! Other cars had a bit of a Blade Runner look to them, the inner city, laboratory, and highway settings had a mixture of the rough and "used-future". With Painter & Photoshop, palettes were created, shapes and textures were refined, and the night time cityscape began to take life.

Here are David Sourwine's final BGs.

Animation & Clean-up

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Animators took the scanned in character poses, placed and composited them into Flash and roughed in their key drawings with the Wacom tablet and eventually their sketched in their breakdown and in-between drawings. Some shots required full animation, many scenes required only limited animation. 6 artists took 4 weeks to create the hundreds of drawings necessary to complete the video.

Then the ink & paint department then took their approved scenes and began the trace over for the final lines and colors. Even though most of the line weight was simple hairline style, with the many shadows and chrome-like shine effects to the animated characters' surfaces it took 6 artists 4 weeks to polish off the final animation.

Here's some of the line tests of the animation as it looked in progress, no soundtrack or effects, just a rough cut of the video as it was half way through production.

For the effects animation, the genius of Jake Macher came through as our only direction to him was 'make it look like Akira' ... and he did. All in-Flash effects for lighting, glows, explosions, blurs, fire and smoke, here's some of his work.

For other slick lighting effects we turned to Sean Garnier who was able to produce some very nice soft glows, streaks and great 80s style back-light effects in Flash.

A few shots had to be done in 3D due to the nature of the prop or vehicle turning in perspective, proving to be far too difficult for traditional animation techniques to handle. For this task we got Dave Thomson's help to model and animate in 3D Studio Max a few of these scenes, exported as Flash art, then easily composited the element into Flash to add in the backdrop bitmaps and Flash lighting/laser effects over top. See samples below.

Final Product

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For the end result we used After Effects to produce a bit of that overlay foggy haze effect over top all the 'flashback' scenes, one camera move just before the car impact, and again in two scenes for some additional spotlight FX on some headlights.

All other FX, character animation, camera moves, and compositing were made with Flash 8.

This was one of the most fun and smoothly-running gigs had been involved with and I hope to be a part of more short and sweet projects like this soon.

See the video here.

See Cory Laffin's 'the making of' documentary here.

See the lo-res version of the music video
from MSTRKRFT's personal site here.
Article featurettes on Cold Hard Flash here & here.

Much Music & MTV broadcasted this numerously on
television and is still available to view on their site,
including Much Music's special on "The Top 10 Best Robot Video'.

Featured on PitchforkTV.
Featured on Yahoo Music.
Featured on Kovideo.

-Full credits list-
Director: Mike White
Co-Director: Derek Jessome
Designs: Derek Jessome, Jeff Knott, Chad Boutilier
Storyboards/Layouts: Derek Jessome, Jeff Knott, Mike White
Backgrounds: David Sourwine
Story: JFK/ALP
Creative Consultant/FX Supervisor: Ron Doucet
Animators: Jacques Daigle, Adam Gunn, Rachel Morrison,
Bianca Siercke, Dave Thomson
Clean-Up Artists: Chad Boutilier, Ian Gallant, Andre Morrison,
Ranada Nickerson, Marc Robichaud
FX Animators: Jake Macher, Sean Garnier
Post Production: Jacques Daigle, Peter Giffen
Documentary By: Cory Laffin
Production Company: Invisible Entertainment