I´ll Kill Her

Joerg Barton independently produced a music video to the song “I’ll kill her” by singer Soko for his media design theses at the university of applied sciences in Mainz, Germany.

For this video, Joerg visualized the singer’s thoughts, which revolved around her feelings about a failed relationship. Inspired by the branch-like look of neurons, which play an important role in the formation of thought, Joerg uses these dead, leafless branch elements to depict the singer’s negative, desperate trains of thought. In contrast, the positive dreams, hopes and expectations are represented by playful, organic and ornamental elements. The video has a fantasy look. Unnatural perspective angles were used to help underscore the video’s surreal look.

Joerg explains a little about the video’s concept and how complex parts of the video were created using standard CINEMA 4D tools: "The video was created using a collage technique in which various elements created and animated in CINEMA 4D were combined with film and photo material using After Effects. I used numerous CINEMA 4D animation and simulation techniques when creating the 3D animations. For example, the main character’s hair was created and animated using the HAIR module: Hair was simply assigned to a polygonal sphere for quick and easy results. The sphere’s visibility was turned off for rendering, its shape modified to fit that of the character’s head and subsequently animated. A final rendering of the hair in the alpha channel let me combine the hair with the masked-out character in After Effects. The butterflies’ wings, for example, were drawn in Illustrator and placed into the Luminance and Alpha channels of the CINEMA 4D material. To animate the wings I assigned Bend objects to the layers on which the wing materials lay, which let me simulate the typical movement of a butterfly’s wings. Here I also used After Effects to bring the butterfly animations, including CINEMA 4D depth-of-field, together with other rendered elements. The animation of the banners that blow in the wind and are wrapped around the heart were created using the Clothilde module. The leaves of the flowers were created in Illustrator, given an alpha channel and imported into CINEMA 4D. They were then animated using the CINEMA 4D plugin Xfrog. The surreal camera perspective was achieved by rendering various 3D shapes and objects using different camera movements and depths of field in CINEMA 4D, and combining these in After Effects".

More information & online portfolio: www.joerg-barton.com


Homepage University of Applied Sciences, Mainz: www.fh-mainz.de


"I´ll kill her" video at Vimeo: http://www.vimeo.com/5020497