Awesome music video using Plexus by Rich Bernett.

Tools used

Author Notes

We shot 2 main setups, both in the same room. The practical band set-up where they are dressed as technicians took about 5 hours to shoot. We then broke down the large sci-fi equipment props and filmed the band performing the song in their typical stage arrangement.

When we filmed, I had planned to use the actual walls of the room in the final video. I dressed them with big cardboard circles of various colors, and It wound up looking terrible. So I created a new digital environment in post, which gave me more latitude for some of those AE camera moves.

I tracked points of movement for each band member, about 20 points or so per musician, then applied that position data to null layers to drive the Plexus effects. It was a great surprise when Plexus3 released the week before I started digging into the GFX work. The new workflow saved me a ton of time, and the addition of native motion blur helped the effects sit better within the environment. The massive levels of renderers, effectors, geometry, and layer objects in the hierarchy would have been a nightmare to navigate in previous versions!

In post, I masked out their instruments from a plate shot, then arranged the instruments in Z space depending on where they were in the space of the room. I wanted to be sure everyone stayed behind their instruments correctly during moves! 
The scenes where Plexus sprites bloom out of equipment just took a bit of camera-tracking and masking in order to sell the effect that they existed in that space.

A lot of additional lighting, plug-ins for glow effects, masking, and other special sauce went into making it all work together to get it to the point you see in the video.

I don't have a making of video in the general sense - I posted a bunch of fun snippets on my instagram account during the production and post process.

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