A while back I did a project for the artists Vuyo and Ol’Burger Beats where they wanted some kind of graphics video loop they could use with their music. They sent me some examples of stuff they liked, and we quickly found out we wanted some sort of 2D artstyle, but mixed with my 3D graphics.
After a lot of experimentation with different shaders and styles and further exchange of concepts I landed on this:
NOTE: Recommend listening to their album Dialogue. while watching 😀
Since this was supposed to be a short video snip repeated over and over for potentially quite some time, I wanted to both make the repetitions as seamless and possible without breaking “the flow” and cram as many details and symbolic nuggets in as possible.
Hence ensued a detailed study of all their songs focused on pining down every visual way to relate the video to the audio. After a while I started getting a feel for Vuyo’s extraordinary story and his “vibe”. I wanted to capture the same essence, and so, trying to match the high degree of symbolism of his songs, I put that same story in the loop. The story of growing up in Africa during some of the harshest race conflicts of this time, with football being an essential relief. Of having to move to Norway at a very early age due to his parents fight against apartheid. Of the difficulties crossing the border, of coping with a totally new culture, of alcohol misuse and the feeling of loosing the grip and falling down the ditch. But also of coming out of that ditch and coping with the new tomorrow.
Here’s a look on the concepts we landed on together:
An important inspiration for the final product was the intro to the anime “Laid-Back Camp”. This featured and intriguing use of 2D planes and textures to create a very intriguing semi-3D effect. To get familiar with this style I made a rough recreation in Blender:
However, I wanted to make use of my 3D graphics knowledge, and took a deeper look and cell shading and the potential for combining this with the 2D-plane technique. Here’s an early experiment inspired by similar video-loops:
The setup for the final video-loop looked like this (unshaded from the side):
