The Chemical Brothers’ new music video for "Wide Open" features guest vocals from Beck and stars dancer Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina), but we think the true scene stealers are the captivating, see-them-to-believe-them VFX delivered by The Mill. 3D Lead Artist, David Fleet, explains how creating a fully-CG, "latticed" model with nothing to hide, left him and his London-based team with nowhere to hide.
It was an idea that the directors, Dom & Nic, were thinking about. They’ve collaborated with The Chemical Brothers many times and have established quite a lot of trust. They pushed this idea of a dancer seeing herself changing and came to us with images they found on the internet. They showed us a 3D-printed rocking chair with a procedural-style mesh and asked, “Could we make a person out of this stuff?”
To which you replied?
Well, straight away, I knew there was a full list of challenges, mainly because she’d be completely see through. It was difficult to even have a conversation about it because it was so abstract and not necessarily something we’ve ever seen before. They listed Ex Machina as a reference but they didn’t want her to be a robot or look too cyborg-y. They wanted her to look elegant and beautiful rather than gory or disturbing. We got one of our concept artists, Nathan Mckenna, to really quickly blast out some speed paints and we used those as a conversation starter for what we’d try to achieve. That made everything a lot easier and a visual language started to develop. We spent several days bashing out tests in Maya — I was using SOuP and all sorts of scripts found on the internet — in order to visualize what it could look like, all while we were planning the shoot itself.
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To what do you credit her very organic look to?
I’d have to say the choreography. We worked with Wayne McGregor, Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet in London. The dance had to tell a story and communicate that she was on a journey. Wayne and Dom & Nic spent a day with us blocking all of it out, figuring out how we could shoot it. The rest of it was the tracking. We did our best to make it completely smooth which was definitely not easy. We could have tried to alter the choreography to suit us but once you saw Sonoya [Mizuno] dancing, it would have been such as shame to turn away any part of it for our technical reasons.
Was the minimal set a necessity in order to pull off the effect required?
The original treatment proposed we shoot on a beach at sunset but that would allow for only two or three go’s and we knew it wouldn't be enough to shoot all our lighting reference and HDRI imagery while trying to set in all of the effects passes and clean plates. Shooting on a beach would also make tracking it extremely difficult and there would be a lot of stands all over which would mean massive cleanup later. Next, they suggested a forest clearing location as an alternative, but after considering what it would be like to move a Steadicam through there, not to mention the scanning, we suggested an enclosed space. It would give us lots of natural features for tracking and we could have more control over things, including light. They came to us with a warehouse space in Shoreditch. We got in a day early and set up all of our witness cameras and tracker markers and so on, which gave us maximum time on the day of the shoot.
How long was this in the works?
They started talking to us in September. We originally only had a couple of months to turn this around based on the initial idea was to cut it down to a two-minute movie. Once we got it back from the shoot and looked at it though, we decided it wasn’t something we should cut down. It was too nice. We decided to push for more time.
We noticed that The Chemical Brothers appear on a canvas in the background. Are there any other Easter Eggs to look out for?
You’re the only ones so far to have said they’ve noticed that! That was actually put in in post. There are a couple of other little bits, like some odd pieces of graffiti. Some of our artists may have tagged their own names but I’m not sure that I should say that (laughs). My name, “D. Fleet,” is in there somewhere. I’ll challenge you to find it.
What was the biggest complexity in all of this?
The main one was contending with a single, four and a half-minute take. We’re accustomed to making 30 to 60-second commercials with 20-30 shots being 2-3 seconds each. One long shot brought a layer of complexity with it that none of us could have predicted. There was nowhere to hide, the animation had to be spot on. All our lighting was natural with half being ambient and the other direct sunlight, so we had to reflect that in our lighting setup. Then there was the amount of comp and clean-up work required. We split it all into about 7 shots, and we picked the best possible join points that we could. There was a huge tracking document going, indicating which artists were helping on what bits: some on the t-shirt, some on the markers on the wall, some on the skin markers and others on beauty work. It was pretty immense.
The Mill’s Neil Davies commented that this was a breakthrough project of extreme technical complexity and precision while also being a real piece of art. Care to expand?
Technically speaking, we developed a lot of extra tools and really pushed the limits of our pipeline so that was a breakthrough. It was also a breakthrough in terms of project management. Trying to get a job like this over the line pushed us in every possible way, especially considering how busy we were with other projects at the time. With this, nobody was being sold anything. There was no chain of clients, it was just us and the directors. It was very much a collaborative art piece. Dom literally sat with me as I modeled the character. It was a rare expression of creativity that let us flex a different sort of muscle.
What are you particularly proud of?
One of the big things is that we developed a custom tool that would automatically erase a given section of the live action plate. As long as we had an accurate camera track and we had geometry to project it onto, the tool would essentially project the last healthy section it could find of the plate onto the area where the dancer was. It wasn’t always perfect, but it allowed us to take off a significant portion of the cleanup work. It’s complicated but our making of video [to be released this week] will tell you more about how all that worked.
What was the single hardest detail to achieve?
The hardest bit is where you see her body through her limbs. We teamed up with FBFX and we did a scan of Sonoya’s entire body with very hi-res textures. The quality was fantastic. We had three different rigs: a photoreal rig for rendering, an animation rig which showed her body or her “latticed limbs” depending on what the animators wanted to look at, and we had a high poly render rig which only got the quite dense geometry. We tracked her entire body and essentially rendered a photoreal double which gave the compositors something to paint through. When you see parts of her body through her mesh, that’s a render.
It’s very ambitious.
Yes, I think that’s a good way to describe it, indeed (laughs). There were points along the way where we looked at each other and were like, 'What the hell are we doing?' Dom & Nic truly kept us geared up to keep going. It was that kind of a relationship.
Challenge has to be what drives you to do this kind of work in the first place.
Absolutely. I’ll wake up in the night sometimes worrying about how we'll tackle something like pipeline, technical, render farm capacity, crew... The concern with this was always about the camera tracking and body tracking. No rig in the world can ever completely track the surface of somebody's skin so there was always going to be a certain amount of shifting things around in comp. The project would live or die on the success of that.
Do you ever feel like what you signed up for is something that just can't be done?
(Laughs) Well, we do a lot of preparation up front. On this job, we knew it was going to be hard — but did we know it would be this hard? I don’t think so, no. We always believed that we would be achieving something great once we pulled it off though.
This visual ode to procedural cellular structures is brought to you by the Grammy-nominated band, The Chemical Brothers, Dom & Nic, The Mill — and dexterous dance partners, Maya and Flame, and products available in the Autodesk Media & Entertainment Collection.
Learn more about the project here.
