Robots Gone Wild

Visual effects artist Noah Rappaport directs a team of CINEMA 4D artists in the creation of three music videos for Disco Biscuits.

What would a skinny, gangly robot do if it could break free from its, well, robotic life and roam freely around a big city? Noah Rappaport has some idea. A longtime visual effects and broadcast motion graphics artist, Rappaport has always wanted to direct a project. This spring he got his chance when Los Angeles-based Ghost Town Media, for whom he had been freelancing, asked him to submit a story concept to go along with three tracks from the new Disco Biscuits album, “Planet Anthem.”

The band, which describes its music as being electronica jam-fusion, loved Rappaport’s idea to use a robot as the main character in their music videos, including one for their single “On Time,” which includes a lot of tech-related lyrics.

With just five weeks to complete the first of the three videos, Rappaport had to work fast. So he quickly assembled an international team of skilled 3D artists he’d learned about while participating in forums for users of MAXON’s CINEMA 4D. Rodolfo Roth, from Brazil, modeled the robot. Anton Moss, from Philadelphia, did all the texturing with BodyPaint 3D, and Dublin-based Brian Horgan rigged the model to work with pre-captured motion-capture files, as well as keyframed animation.

Though each of the three-minute videos is for a different song, they make up a trilogy that tells the story of a robot who escapes from a factory where robots are made by other robots. “The whole story is kind of about how, if something couldn’t talk but had intelligence and emotion, it would build on that and communicate,” Rappaport explains.

To stay on budget, footage for all three videos was shot at the same time in just five days. Two weeks into production, as they were about to start shooting, Rappaport was finished creating animatics from CINEMA 4D to use on set and plan each shot. High dynamic range (HDR) photos he had taken of the club set came in handy when Rappaport worked with David Torno of Ghost Town Media to light scenes and composite scenes in CINEMA 4D using Global Illumination and minimal directional lights. Ghost Town also handled all the motion tracking for the videos. Compositing was done with After Effects.

Shots inside the robot factory were filmed with a handheld camera so Rappaport could 3D track what the camera was seeing and replicate that in CINEMA 4D . “We used SynthEyes for all of our 3D tracking,” he explains. “I wanted to see exactly what the camera did, so the motion blur could be fully replicated inside CINEMA 4D.” If time had allowed, Rappaport would have liked to do more 3D tracking but he instead added camera motion in After Effects to achieve the look he wanted.

Lighting in the dance club where the robot dances with a pretty brunette was a little tricky to pull off, Rappaport says. To do it, he used an HDR globe he had made from on-set photographs that he took with the help of the director of photography and an actor who stood exactly where the robot would be in the shot. “I used a panoramic camera and photographed multiple exposures of the spot where the robot would be so I was able to replicate the lighting setup with 100% accuracy,” he says, adding that if there were one thing he would do over he would make the robot a little beefier because his skinny frame sometimes got lost on camera.

Having used both Global Illumination and HDR for the project, render times were too long to be rendered in-house, so Rappaport and Ghost Town opted to use a render farm for most of the shots. “We processed a few things in-house but there were something like 70 shots in ‘On Time’ and the entire video was about 6,000 frames, so we needed to crank that out someplace else,” Rappaport says.

Noah Rappaports Website
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