MTV Music Awards

MTV Travels Back in Time to the Age of 8-Bit Pixel Graphics!

A pixel, a single point on the monitor! A valued element before the introduction of 3D graphics, when the most efficient use of pixels had to be carefully weighed. Later, when more than just 320 x 200-pixel resolution was possible, the desire for 3D in games such as Zaxxon, Marble Madness and Crystal Castles was stirred. A wave of isometric games followed. During this time, a young Kay Tennemann sat behind the iron curtain that divided Germany and was fascinated by the possibilities for computer graphics that were slowly emerging, like the Atari ST. He became active and created is own complex graphics pixel-by-pixel for demos and intros for the demo scene.

Jump to the future: The MTV Music Awards are presented each year and each time MTV makes sure the whole world watches. Specially produced videos, clips and trailers are used to announce the awards across the globe and have helped hype the Music Awards to one of the most important events in the music industry! Accordingly, MTV places high demands on the design of these clips. Inspiration for ideas for each campaign is sought from external sources and various agencies and designers are asked to submit creative concepts. An internal MTV panel judges the submissions and decides who will be given the nod.

Kay Tennemann was one of those invited by an agency to submit his vision of the MTV Music Award’s theme in 2009. Kay, who was also busy with other projects at the time, was convinced that the best he could do was achieve an honorable mention. Following his instincts, he applied his experience in the world of isometric pixel construction to the visual design of his concept. He coupled retro with modern visuals of rhythmic music videos and designed an entire world made up of blocks that looked astonishingly similar to pixels and arranged isometrically.

Not noticing at the beginning but realizing it more and more as the clip developed, Kay was creating his own highly personal coming to terms of a still omnipresent theme that had followed him from his time as a citizen of the former East Germany: the story of a divided Germany. His clip became a visual hymn for the liberation of the gray pixel block world by joyful colors of freedom. They tell of how walls can fall and how a gray mass succumbs to colorful individualism.

A CINEMA 4D professional, Kay used his software of choice to create his vision. CINEMA 4D’s MoGraph Cloner object in conjunction with several clever scripts allowed Kay to animate his pixel worlds in interesting ways: blocks changed colors, block-shaped clouds rained down through clouds and – you guessed it – swarms of blocks floating weightlessly through the air!

Kay created all of this in an isometric look that looks like someone had built a city made up of blocks and filmed them from the top at a 90° angle – exactly the way it looked on the Amiga and Atari ST back in the day. But as the clip progresses, Kay breaks through this convention and lets the camera meander freely through his pixelatious city. Kay submitted a working design of his vision to the agency that in turn submitted it to MTV. Time went by and Kay turned his attention to other projects – until the agency called to tell Kay that MTV wanted to arrange a meeting with him: the pitch for the MTV clip had impressed the panel and they wanted to discuss details for awarding the contract.

The rest is advertising history: Kay was awarded the contract and created video clips for the MTV Music Awards 2009. His modernized retro look was a trend setter and surely these clips would not have looked the way they did had Kay not lived out his love of pixeling and done so using CINEMA 4D!

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