Arjan wrote a beautiful piece of music and
wanted to promote it on the internet. What better way than to
make a music video! Here, we talk to Arjan about his
inspiration and how he accomplished the finished
piece.
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| Q: What was your role
on the Black Hole
video? | |
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I created both the visuals and the music.
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| Q: How many artists worked on
the project?
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Just me :)
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| Q: Could you supply a bit of
background on how and when the video was started? What
was the
outline? | |
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Recently, I recorded an album of my latest music and I
wanted to promote my it on the internet.
It has always
been a bit of a dream of mine to create both the music and the
visuals for a music video. I decided to create a new song and
the visuals at the same time.
I started with the music
and tried to create the visuals, which I imagined, while
creating the music. While making the visuals I changed the
music to fit with them. This way I created the music video, on
and off in the evening hours. It took about a year to
complete.
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| Q: Can you approximate the
amount of shots that you completed? Why did you
choose Fusion?
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Here at House of Secrets, our main compositing software is
Fusion. Mainly because of its versatility and ease of use.
For my music video I needed a lot of flexibility so
that I could completely change the look of a shot after it was
rendered. Not only because some of the shots took a really
long time to render but also because I wanted to be able to
tweak everything until the end of the process. For example, I
used Fusion to create the look of the dark grass field with
the same source render files as the bright grass
field.
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| Q: What was
the biggest challenge?
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One of the biggest challenges of the music video was
creating the grass field. As I wanted to have a constantly
moving ground below the grass, I couldn't just use some
randomized piece of grass spread out on a plane. Every piece
of grass had to react to the moving ground below. This way it
was a very heavy scene to tweak and eventually to render.
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| Q: Was there
a particular shot that was more complex than usual or
turned out better than you could have
hoped?
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One shot that really turned out a lot better then I
expected is the dark grass field shot. Because the grass field
took really long to render, it took our renderfarm a whole
weekend, I didn't want to make a new render for the dark
field. I created a new comp and started experimenting with the
rendered sequences of the bright grass field in Fusion. Due to
the fact that I rendered the shot in a few different layers
and masks I could create the look exactly as I wanted.
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| Q: What are
some of your favorite tools in Fusion and how do they
help in production?
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My favorite Fusion tool is the Custom tool. Because of the
use of expressions, I can do a lot of things easily with one
custom tool that otherwise would need a whole network of
nodes.
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| Q: What's next for
the team at House of Secrets? What's next for
you? | |
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As for House of Secrets, we are working on some nice
commercial projects and our short film.
I am working
on my second music video and hope to finish it within a few
months.
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| Q: Finally,
what's your favorite
beer? | |
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All kinds are fine with me.
Visit the House of Secrets website here.
Visit Arjan's website
here.
See the Black Hole
music video on Vimeo here.
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