Floating Metal Key image

Floating Metal Key Music and images are often intertwined in new media - and Cinema 4D often plays an important role in adding impressive imagery to music.

Prior to the introduction of musician Mathew Wilcock's newest album, he wanted to use an EP single to raise awareness for the album. Attention to the EP single would in turn be generated by a video. Standing out in the crowd is not an easy task these days, considering the extent to which spectacular visuals are added to videos! The video had to hold its own against the rest, which is why Mathew hired Tony Zagoraios as art director/concept designer and Dan Kokotalijo as director for the project.

All three had often worked together in the past so convincing Tony to take over the role of art director was the easy part. Mathew explained his concept of what visuals he wanted for his music: visuals that are inspired by the underlying music and underscore its ambience and mood - and combine to create a pictorial story. Based on this information, Tony began to create a storyboard.

Tony used CINEMA 4D to create most of the visuals and had to use several elements taken from external applications for the animation - which "… was not a problem thanks to CINEMA 4D's comprehensive import options," as Tony states. "Especially the file exchange with After Effects and its seamless integration with CINEMA 4D sped up workflow enormously!" Otherwise, many aspects of the work on 'Floating Metal Key' was interdisciplinary and included numerous applications - with CINEMA 4D at the core of the project.

Much of the work done in CINEMA 4D was done using the MoGraph feature, which was used to animate the numerous object fragments floating in the scene. Hair and spline dynamics as well as Thinking Particles, and almost all Deformer objects were used to really put things in motion. Features not offered by CINEMA 4D were simply created via plugins such as Thrausi, for example.

The animation was rendered primarily using CINEMA 4D's Standard Renderer. The Physical Renderer was used to render a few scenes that required render settings not included with the Standard Renderer. By strategically splitting the render process between both renderers and with the right settings, the team was able to accurately plan the required render time, which was split up across three render clients.

The team members who worked on this project were spread out across the globe and worked over a network to complete the project. Their hard work quickly paid off as 'Floating Metal Key' was selected as Vimeo's 'staff pick' only a few weeks after release. Mathew and his team are also planning to enter the animation, which already has over 110,000 clicks, in various festivals. All team members benefitted from working on this project: "The coordination between the various team members and fine-tuning various aspects such as environment, scene setup and timing were challenging and resulted in a vast exchange of know-how amongst everyone involved. Everyone was able to gain a great deal of technical and production experience, and learn a lot about CINEMA 4D in particular." concludes Tony Zagoraias.


About Tony Zagoraios:
www.artonemotion.com

About Matthew Wilcock:
www.matthewwilcock.com

About Dan Kokotajlo:
www.dankokotajlo.com

About "Floating Metal Key":
www.itunes.apple.com/gb/album/floating-metal-key