Ocean Wisdom X Method Man | Step | Animated Music Video
The last two times I’ve been involved with making music videos for Ocean Wisdom was via my animation studio Grizzle. The productions on both those occasions, Drilly Rucksack & Tom & Jerry, were more traditional hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation. While I did contribute here and there, my involvement was more advisory/directorial, namely finding awesome people and setting them spinning in the right direction.
This time around though, the style and direction was far more up my street: weird oddball 3D. That’s me reverting to type. I wasn’t flying completely solo, though; this was a joint effort between myself and Hannah Johnson one of our awesome full-time animators at Grizzle.
Method Man Colab
The video is a collaboration with Method Man, and if you know who he is, you’re probably old enough to remember the earliest days of Hip-Hop. I grew up listening to 36 Chambers - it came out when I was 10, and me and my mates started getting into it around the age of 14/15. It was a light relief from the Britpop 💩 flying around at the time. Everyone was going mad for the Spice Girls, but by 14 we were done with it. Also on the scene at the time were Mobb Deep, who produced some of the greatest tracks in history. It was a golden time for the genre.
I’m saying all this because when someone offers you the chance to work on a track with one of Hip-Hop’s greatest rappers, who was part of one of the greatest rap groups ever, it’s an absolute done deal.
Hannah’s awesome 2D touch
The insanely grotesque and weird 3D work is me in my happy place, but the glue that meshes this all together is the genius work of Hannah Johnson.
There are no special effects here, it’s graft: (digital) pen on (digital) paper. Frame-by-frame overlays were added after the 3D elements were built, and boy does it lift the piece up. The 3D on its own, maybe a 6/10, but by the time Hannah has done her stuff, it’s a 10/10. It’s magic what an effect it has on the mood, the style, and the overall enjoyment for the viewer. We meticulously matched the timing of as many lyrics as we could.
Real mouth overlays
We loved this effect, but it’s pretty time-consuming, and sadly we didn’t have time to do more as we were pushed to hit the deadline.
We supplied Ocean with a call sheet of all the main mouth shapes for different vowel and consonant sounds, which he posed for and supplied us with pictures. We then treated them and spliced them over the top of the 3D character’s mouth, timed to the lyrics of the music.
3D Character Workflow
The most astute motion designers among you will see this is a Mixamo-fest.
We used Daz3D for the body bases - a character called Collosal for both Ocean and Method Man. With some bodging, we managed to get these out of Daz and into Mixamo to apply animation and then into C4D for the rest of the lighting, etc.
I spent a LOT of time trying to get all this stuff to work and be customizable, but I’m doing this write-up way too long after the job, so I can’t remember how it was done. However, it CAN be done, but there are limitations.
To get the realism of the faces, we used Facegen. There are now better tools out there to do this, but we had compatibility issues with them, so we used trusty old Facegen inside of Daz.
I believe the flow went something like this:
Daz 3D
Apply Collosal character
Pictures into Facegen
Import Facegen data into Daz
Export obj out of Daz into Mixamo
Select desired animation in Mixamo and apply to character Mesh
Export from Mixamo to C4D as FBX (I think?)
Use motion clips in C4D to link different animations together
Travis Davids is the Oracle on this style of work, you should definitely check him out like I did.