ft. Ysabel & E.M. Hudson (Official Lyric Video)
Video & Animation by Hunter Hempen
Produced & Mixed by Eric Hudson
Mastered by Sean Pierce & Dylan Shultz
THE BEGINNING
Early at the start of the pandemic in February 2020, local STL musician and creator of Macaron Afterparty, Gary Schmidt, approached me to create a lyric video for his auxiliary project's newest single "Suddenly". The song spoke of a heavy, hypnotic pull that washed, fell, dived, and swam down into an eternal state of love and bliss. He described the visuals as needing to be "glitchy and chaotic, soothing and trippy". Pulling from various glitch references of his favorite lyric videos, Gary also requested a color palette inspired by the famous children's book "The Rainbow Fish".
After listening to the first pass of the track, a lot of ideas started coming to mind. The song had very soothing and floaty verses, diving into very guitar heavy driven chorus. Gary sought to incorporate images of the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, in some fashion as well. After considering Gary's input, I began creating several environments, styleframes, textures, and animations to bring to life a very water heavy, lyrically drifting and harmonic track.
After listening to the first pass of the track, a lot of ideas started coming to mind. The song had very soothing and floaty verses, diving into very guitar heavy driven chorus. Gary sought to incorporate images of the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, in some fashion as well. After considering Gary's input, I began creating several environments, styleframes, textures, and animations to bring to life a very water heavy, lyrically drifting and harmonic track.
The end result was an epic, bomb diving and trippy hypnotic flash of displaced colors and renders, all designed, animated, and rendered completely in my spare time. Despite doing all of this under the shadow of social distancing, I have to thank Gary for giving me extreme free reign of exploration that undoubtedly kept the aggressive side of my creativity sane during quarantine. Enjoy the video below and read further for an in depth breakdown into the many elements behind this song and video.
BREAKDOWN
Being a lyric video, text treatment was obviously a significant portion of the design. I began experimenting with several color modes and fonts to arrive at the current treatment - as well as running all the text through some classic Photoshop wind for an interesting glitch heavy / tearing effect.
Each scene featuring a 3D render of some sort had the same system of glitches, distortion, filters, particles, background renders, Photoshop processing and displacement maps applied for uniformity between shots. The loop below shows the various amounts of layers involved for a typical shot unto completion.
The song had several big guitar and synth dives, each requiring an immersive transition into the following section. I settled on a frequently used watercolor paint reveal preset from Creative Dojo, blending it in with displacement maps and those heavy glitches.
The centerpiece of the chorus, Poseidon himself, had a fairly simple yet colorful trippy approach: a high quality 3D statue scan off Turbo Squid, a mix material of slight marble and animated rainbow swirls in Octane, and simple displacement scales applied uniformly are pretty much all that makes up the eternally evolving and shifting look of the king of the sea.
Originally I would've kept a dimly lit undersea environment for the song's bridge, but the second verse described it better.
And I, I, I could see the diver descend,
who swam down to the bottom to discover a man
Rising from the shoreline with the King Poseidon
I swam back to the bottom with them
I applied the same glitches and distortion as the above-water scenes, but used a slightly different water displacement map and sea particle bubbles to sell an underwater look. A noise map driven lighting system from above also cast some fantastic lighting to Poseidon below.
One of the obvious (maybe not so obvious) themes to the lyric video are the frequent use of hexagons. Gary requested this initially as a simple shape he would like to incorporate. I realized later that the song's many references to love and "a breakthrough in organic chemistry" could actually be tied in with dopamine and norepinephrine, the "love" chemical in human biology.
I then placed this theme throughout the various hexagon glitches, from hexagon chemistry symbols etched into the giant sea hexagons, hexagon particles, to placing the chemical structure for dopamine itself into Poseidon's hand at his hip.
Hot4D was the classic and obvious go-to for an easy, instant, and beautiful procedural ocean to place the world in. Amazingly I didn't render on the higher subdiv needed (kept crashing, lol), thanks to the geometry looking very solid at lower numbers anyways. The same swirly color texture was also applied to the water, in addition to the many other layers of hexagons and glitches throughout the video.
There was plenty that didn't make the cut for the final video, most of it early exploration into what did or didn't work thematically. A few times in the video you can spot a giant 3D macaron pastry flying by, but overall it seemed out of place to hinge the video visually on too many of these. Some not-so apparent elements did end up in the piece but were heavily composited either for their color mode use or other motion.
In conclusion, a big thanks to Gary once more for working with me on this awesome project during these crazy times. Keep making kickass music, buddy! Be sure to check out all the links for Macaron Afterparty below and support Gary's music:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/macaronafte...
Bandcamp: https://macaronafterparty.bandcamp.com/
