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New music video C100s, GoPro, retro gaming and VHSish grade


jgharding
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We had a lot of fun making this one, three people in crew in total and a £500 budget for all the extras (props location etc) the kit is our own

Animation took a long time, and VHS style was tough to build! Happy to answer questions on production if anyone is interested!

Great music video. How did you go about creating the VHS look? The first 15 or so seconds looks brilliant, especially.

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Really nice video and idea good job! I also wanna know more on how you got those first scenes to look like that and also, you are using some pretty well known symbols of famous video games. Arent you worried about having issues from their companies? Or is it on a level where you say that they ll never know or care that this exists?

 

Btw it reminded me the general approach to videos Red Fang have

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Thankyou both for your kind words!

On VHS grade, I suppose it's important to point out we didn't want 100% authentic, otherwise we would have simply run the film out to an old VHS! We wanted to give an impression of it while maintaining more control, resolution and colour.

In After Effects: Each clip was de-logged, and given a basic grade to look nice and cinematic with a slight film tone. Various flares and glows were stuck in for colourful effect. The master comp contained two copies of the whole film, one layer black and white and one colour, so that the colour layer could be manipulated independently of the luminance, to give some impression of the VHS style separation of colour and luminance. The whole thing is fast blurred by a pixel as it's a bit sharp straight out of camera.

The colour layer wiggles a bit all the time so that the colour separates a little. There is an overlay of 16mm film grain which also imparts a certain film tone to the piece, then a layer of real VHS chroma/luma noise blended in (sort of yellow and blue looking grunge), as well as select bits of VHS tracking white streaks, which were keyed out of a real captured VHS tape. At the top there's a partial inversion of the overall luma which serves to make a kind of technicolor over saturation which blows the skin yellow orange and pumps the colours up.

The chroma interference uses a displacement map to push the colour layer about and create the roll-down distortion. On the top are the scanlines that are made with the 'venetian blinds' plugin. On top of that are the cinemas-cope bars, since everything was shot spherical, not anamorphic.

In other words, it's lots of little tricks

*

On the subject of symbols and characters, there's several reasons we think it's all good. Firstly, rather than use real assets we've recreated our own parodies, that is to say we made them ourselves rather than taking other peoples' art. We don't use the names of any specific IP, nor do we use actual music or game-play from any other IP. Some companies have a new system of revenue share for videos directly using their IP, but it's unlikely to apply here, more to actual game-play videos or direct uses of real sprites or exact recreations with names, rather than sprites that are "inspired by" original IP.

It's possible to find parodies of popular games online with tens of millions of views, that still remain online despite including horrific violence and racism, so i think we're good as far as that's concerned, ours is a little lighter hearted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Wn48geCJ8

Also yes, it'll probably be under most radars ;)

 

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Best penis swinging physics I have ever seen in a computer game!

Loved the whole style, it's entertaining from start to finish. If anything it almost looked too good!! If you really want VHS quality.... shoot with a NEX VG90!! It has the VHS colours straight out of the camera. I'm not joking!!

Have you seen Computer Chess? I haven't yet but loved the trailer and it's on my list... that looks very CRT tubey.

I love it when someone puts a ton of effort into something and its a labour of love which this music video clearly was. Enjoyed the music too man... we shall have to work together on something in the future, perhaps when I get myself back to the UK and divorce myself from my family of 600 lenses and 24 cameras :)

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Best penis swinging physics I have ever seen in a computer game!

 

This!  

I'd be more worried about the video getting flagged for the penises than copyright infringement on the games. It's more like fan art.

The animations are absolutely amazing! Enjoyed every second of it. Awesome job, love it! :d

The VHS style is also very cool, but maybe a tad to sharp and detailed. Not really an issue, but the SD-look of Kung Fury was a bit more convincing imo. Maybe downsizing to 480p and upsizing to 1080p would give kind of the same effect? 

Anyway I think it has potential (and deserves!) to reach a huge audience on YouTube, if a few big blogs pick it up...

You should send it to some gamer websites/blogs. I think http://kotaku.com/ is a good fit. Or send some behind the scenes info + shots to http://petapixel.com/

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Best penis swinging physics I have ever seen in a computer game!

Loved the whole style, it's entertaining from start to finish. If anything it almost looked too good!! If you really want VHS quality.... shoot with a NEX VG90!! It has the VHS colours straight out of the camera. I'm not joking!!

Have you seen Computer Chess? I haven't yet but loved the trailer and it's on my list... that looks very CRT tubey.

I love it when someone puts a ton of effort into something and its a labour of love which this music video clearly was. Enjoyed the music too man... we shall have to work together on something in the future, perhaps when I get myself back to the UK and divorce myself from my family of 600 lenses and 24 cameras :)

Cheers buddy :) that was the drummer Garth, he's a great animator: http://vimeo.com/garthlee

I just checked out computer chess, it looks meticulously retro, I think I'll give that a watch!

I'm trying to plan a shoot in Berlin so I can come over for an extended period, so we can do it then if I can wangle it, it's such a great city...

This!  

I'd be more worried about the video getting flagged for the penises than copyright infringement on the games. It's more like fan art.

The animations are absolutely amazing! Enjoyed every second of it. Awesome job, love it! :d

The VHS style is also very cool, but maybe a tad to sharp and detailed. Not really an issue, but the SD-look of Kung Fury was a bit more convincing imo. Maybe downsizing to 480p and upsizing to 1080p would give kind of the same effect? 

Anyway I think it has potential (and deserves!) to reach a huge audience on YouTube, if a few big blogs pick it up...

You should send it to some gamer websites/blogs. I think http://kotaku.com/ is a good fit. Or send some behind the scenes info + shots to http://petapixel.com/

haha cheers, check out Garth's animations for more fun, he's a great drummer AND animator, a rare thing! http://vimeo.com/garthlee

Yes it's not really authentic as such, we did start off with a look closer to Kung Fury, much softer, but it looked so fuzzy in some of the wide shots we settled on a an "impression" of VHS, a bit of the feel rather than authentic. I did actually have an old VHS ready to genuinely dub the film, but we thought better of it ;)

I've knocked up a press release so yes we're going to throw it to a few blogs, thanks for the suggestions, I'll add em to the list.

Oh BTW I thought I'd add that this was all C100 and Ninja 2, not the AVCHD internal. It was recorded to DNxHD 220x.

Actually one shot came from the AVCHD backup, as occasionally the Ninja just doesn't trigger (about 1 in 200 times) which is a bummer. Still you'd never spot the shot so all is well...

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Looks great! This reminds me so much of the VHS tapes Nintendo used to mail out in the 90s featuring whatever new games were hitting the market.

 

Can you talk about the picture profile you used with the C100? Curious to know what you started with. We just picked up a Mark 2 at work and have got a little left over. Considering a Ninja star

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Looks great! This reminds me so much of the VHS tapes Nintendo used to mail out in the 90s featuring whatever new games were hitting the market.

 

Can you talk about the picture profile you used with the C100? Curious to know what you started with. We just picked up a Mark 2 at work and have got a little left over. Considering a Ninja star

many thanks!

it was Clog, though the white balance was set manually in picture styles so it's not cinema lock. Clog with ninja gives you more room, it doesn't go mushy so quickly. Plus you get 422 out of the HDMI which is a bigger difference than the other aspects like bit-rate TBH when it comes to perceptual difference, especially if you've got a lot of red in your shots.

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Very cool! How much time did it take to complete this?


Many thanks! It was two shoot days, the animation was done over a few months in spare days, and the final post was another few days worth spread out. There was about 6 months between when we shot it and when we actually worked on the edit though as some other projects got in the way.

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