Electronic games and alternarock get thrown in the technological blender in Video Mods, MTV2's monthly digital-animation showcase. "It's like the Sims are a band and they want to do a video," says MTV2 producer Alex Coletti, who combines games like BloodRayne 2 and bands like Evanescence with help from IBC Digital of Buffalo, New York. Here's how the production team gets from twitch to mosh.
1. Licensing: The first step in making a "video mod" can be deceptively difficult: securing the rights to marry a song with a game. "These are huge profit-generating properties," Coletti says. "Letting someone mess with them takes a leap of faith." Once record and game companies hand over the "assets" (song, models, background graphics, cut scenes), the directors can execute a concept, write a shooting script, and draw storyboards.
2. Tweaking and pre-viz: The visual assets usually require work before they can be animated; characters may need to be flexible enough to, say, play guitar behind their heads, and environments that a game renders on the fly need to be consolidated. Tweaked models and backgrounds are loaded into Alias|Wavefront's Maya animation program to produce a previsualization, a sort of 3-D storyboard that serves as a template for animation.
3. Motion-capture: When a Video Mods character moves, it's replaying motions originally performed by a human actor whose joints were tracked in 3-D space. But human motions don't always match the software model. "In a game like Death Jr., demons who drag their knuckles on the floor have a hard time playing guitar," Coletti says. In that case, the motion data needs to be scaled to match the character's proportions.
4. Animating and editing: The animators load the motion data into the pre-viz, and the scene springs to life – much like the set of a live-action music video. As the characters gyrate, animators pan virtual cameras and adjust digital lighting in sync with the music. Then they render lo-res previews of all shots and edit them down into a final cut. The result is an "edit decision list" that specifies which frames require compute-intensive hi-res rendering.
5. Rendering: IBC's render farm is sufficient for the preview, but for final rendering the production moves to the Center for Computing Research at SUNY Buffalo. Normally occupied with medical research and molecular modeling, the facility's supercomputers are equally adept at making, say, BloodRayne 2's voluptuous vampire Rayne prance like J.Lo. Finally, the hi-res footage is assembled into a new Video Mods episode at a conventional video studio.
Remix Planet
| Intro
| Making of a Remix: Robot Chicken
| Making of a Remix: The Avalanches
| Making of a Remix: MTV2’s Video Mods
| iMods
