Richard Cranium
Neuritis is a local punk/indie band who approached me to help create a music video for their first single, Richard Cranium. I was the director, editor, and visual effects artist on this project which we filmed over two days. On day 1 we filmed all the shots with the band (plus inserts) and day 2 we filmed the bully scenes that are spread throughout the video.
The visual effects were all created using After Effects.
Guitar smash
Unfortunately we couldn’t smash an actual guitar on set so a bit of special editing in post was required.
On the day of shooting we got a shot of the guitar hitting the ground. I then made a clean-plate of the background, a cutout of the main guitar body and another of the neck, then animated these two elements as if they were a full guitar being broken. I also added a wood texture and parented that to the guitar body and added a shadow on the ground.
Set extension
For the wide shot during the choruses there needed to be enough room above the band for the text graphics to appear. Unfortunately this meant there’d be a few unwanted objects in the foreground that would need to be removed.
The black cloth was simple to replicate by cloning other sections and colour-matching them to blend together. Adding a final colour grade tied everything together to make the effect invisible.
Inspiration
The members of Neuritis and I were very big fans of the movie Scott Pilgrim .vs. The World and wanted the music video to have graphics on screen, energetic lens distortion, and camera angles similar to that of Scott Pilgrim.
The text effects were created by hand-animating each letter, then tinting the desired colour. Occasionally a 3D light was added to match the on-set lighting, then various effects like rotoscoping foreground objects, motion blur, grain were added to integrate the text seamlessly.
The lightning and impact graphics were created in a very similar way, except they were first created with an animated mask on a solid.
