Reach For The Dead Music Video Animation 

The Final Result

My end goal for this project was to try and do something bigger in 3d than I had done before. Start with a simple story idea and try and figure out how to show the actions in it.  Rather than focus on a single asset or animation, I wanted to try and bring multiple assets and movements together and tell a sort of loose structured narrative.

Here is the initial storyboard that I overall wanted to keep it vague.
-There's an old throne in a great hall. Maybe its an abandoned castle? Maybe the king and people are gone or struck ill? Maybe there was a war? Maybe its a tomb?
For sure it is empty, and possibly old. 
-There's vines crawling rapidly though a tunnel. Again, don't know if they are a positive influence or a negative one.
For sure it is something alive and moving quickly
What happens after was up in the air initially. I eventually decided the vines should consume the throne and a figure would emerge. 

To start I gathered concept ideas and created the great hall and the throne. It has fairly large proportions I would say are accurate to real life, but I've never been in a great hall so its a guestimate, but the hall length is about 62ft. I added, spaced and sized the pillars for a nice visual effect. I thought of putting chairs or pews or something to show an audience, but I felt it added a specific purpose to the room and added indirect narrative. Tombs don't have seating and I didn't want to rule that idea out to the audience.  

After the great hall shot was through I established the vine tunnel. Duplicating and trying to randomize rocks wasn't too hard, but was tedious work. 

Then I established the rock wall shot. Using the rocks from the vine tunnel I was able to put them into the MASH instancer in Maya and attach that to a large plane. From there I just randomized some scale and rotation settings. There are 20,000 rocks used for this scene. 

Then I established the vine crawling scene. I was able to animate the vine crawling using CV curve and then attaching a cylinder to it with the curve wrap tool and adjusting the scale ramp and animating the offset and scale length. It was quite a challenge to get all the curves to circle around each other correctly and form the human cocoon thing. 

Next was adjusting and animating the lights and establishing different textures

Then came modeling out the figure and then animating it. I used the auto-rig feature because I knew it wouldn't be that complex. From there I attached a particle emitter and small area light to the mesh. I have never used particle emitters with Maya before and it is a very very steep learning curve. After about 30 hours of trial and error I started getting things about how I wanted them without destroying my computer. 

The last step was the render everything out as an .exr using the Arnold renderer, then taking it into Blender and rendering out video from the exr, and then putting all the shots into Premiere Pro to edit with the music. I could have used the image sequencer in Premiere Pro, but I'm more comfortable with the sequencer in Blender. Overall this project easily took me about 2 months and around 300+ hours and render times for everything took around 60? It gets hard to tell, but I learned a lot