Monday 07 Mar 2005
It’s robot-boy with attitude, baggies, and an iPod. New York-based UVPhactory created the new video for hip-hop artist Peter Miser and yes, these cool hip-hop robots can dance.
Ever feel like a robot at work? Slouching around between the water-cooler and your keyboard, surfing between email and record stores, watched over by a single-track boss with no sense of humour and too much steel up their spine? Then you'll empathize with the robot in hip-hop artist Pete Miser’s new video.
New York’s UVPhactory created the concept, designed and executed the 3D animation, lensed the live-action footage and completed the offline and online editorial for the three-and-a-half minute video for Miser’s new single, Scent of a Robot.
The single tells the story of a cubicle-dwelling everyman who inadvertently discovers that he’s a robot. The video switches between human and robot perspective – first we see the human face (Miser) brushing his teeth, getting to work, getting an earful from his boss (the cyclops style floating robot), then we switch to see Miser as robot. The baggy jeans, the attitude, the feeling of talent forcing itself through the motions of a dull job – the transition from human to robot is obvious, but the character remains the same throughout.
Existential design
“Pete’s song poses a series of existential questions,” says UVPH's senior producer Brian Welsh. “What are humans? What does it mean to be alive, to be a person? We all enjoyed exploring what this robot was like, questioning people’s habitual behaviours and the living of an unexamined life. It was these questions which sparked the idea of a split reality: what the robot perceives and actual reality.”
Work started in the summer of 2004 when Miser commissioned UVPH to create the video. “We got to work shooting the live-action footage in a variety of New York locations: subways, a Manhattan office tower after hours, an apartment and even in the bathroom of our offices,” says Welsh.
“Things really clicked when we heard Scent of a Robot. I thought the lyrics were powerful, but I didn’t want to just illustrate them, I wanted to find an unusual angle,” says UVPH creative director Alexandre Moors.
“The lyrics are about a guy who finds out he is a robot. I thought it would be interesting to have a robot schooled in all the human behaviours, who sees things through ‘human’ eyes, who thinks he is ‘more human than human.’”
The ‘more human than human’ theme is the company’s nod to Blade Runner – in classic sci-fi movie the phrase is the slogan of the company that designs the Replicants.
Moors continues: “He has a robot wife, a robot co-worker, commutes in robot subways. It’s a metaphor for all of us – we can be formatted, programmed like robots and run nine-to-five. So we wove in as many jokes as possible – the video is full of little quotes and motivational posters on the walls of the corporate office, all the guys riding the subways are robots with their robot iPods.”
Moors added, “I gave everyone at UVPhactory an assignment and encouraged them to let their imaginations and creativity run wild, to enjoy themselves. For me the greatest challenge was the creation of the robots – to make them original.
“Everyone is making robots these days but I’m really in love with our little character. He’s a cartoony mix – a modern Steamboat Willie actually modelled on Pete Miser himself.
“He wears baggy shorts, has big hands, short arms and a lazy gait, like a young urban hip-hop kid. The end product is fresh and sunny, which is much harder to create than dark and cynical.”
Making robots dance
Lead character animator Ryan Bradley worked hard to get the character right. In an interview with mvwire.com he explains how he fused hip-hop with the robot’s look:
“The animation that took me longest – even longer than the dance scene – was the walk cycle, the animation in the street. The robot will take one step and then you cycle that over and over again and make him walk from place to place.
“It took me so long to get the right balance of a smooth, laidback hip-hop guy with the rigid, robotic movement of the robot. If you watch him he looks like he has this really cool little walk but it’s also where he likes to pause in between. It took me so long to get that, but I was happy about the way it came out in the end.”
When it came to getting the robots to dance, they looked to Miser for guidance. Bradley explains, “We knew he had a good collection of hip-hop videos so he brought in a couple of his favourite guys. We had actually bought one of those ‘How to’ videos about hip hop dancing, which takes you through step by step, and I studied that for a while.
“I just did some of the moves and worked with the editor Damien Baskette. He developed and edited together some of the different clips of videos that we really liked. If we liked the footwork
or the arm movements from the dancers, he edited a sequence for reference for me and I would study it.
“We went through that and I animated the robot and improved upon it as best as I could, given how the robot could move – the robot can’t move like a human. That’s just the imaginative part of it I guess.”
The company’s senior designer and 3D animator Jake Slutsky oversaw much of the technical process. “I was responsible for the 3D lighting and texturing and handled the transition of elements from 3D to compositing,” he says. “After testing several looks, Alex and I really wanted to create a unified aesthetic, to match the red and white hues of the treated footage.
“Using Softimage|XSI’s toon shader as a base, we built custom shaders to couple the hard-edged toon look with a more natural soft shading. In order to achieve shorter render time, we overlayed 3D wireframe captures and used compositing techniques to more clearly illustrate and pronounce 3D elements within the space.
“The transition from 3D to 2D was exceptional thanks to a plug-in by MindThink Tools that allowed us to export the XSI camera animation to After Effects. With this plug-in we were actually able to lay in 2D graphics and different overlays within 3D space without having to produce everything in XSI. This kept the workflow pretty flexible and design-oriented, and allowed the treatment to mature into the final look.”
Everyone was happy with the final look, including Miser, who says: “The video is so pro, so creative and so absolutely mind-blowing I have to admit I got 200 per cent more video than I ever expected. I was blown away by their efforts. And as it turns out, I’m much better looking as a cartoon character.”
Matthew Bath and Ed Ewing
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