H3000
Running & Flames
Music Video
Commissioned by H3000 and Universal Music, Collider's Creative Director Andrew van der Westhuyzen and Technical Director Hugh Carrick-Allan came up with a completely unique way to approach a music video.
Andrew proposed using the game engine Unreal to build a playable open-world game to create two music clips from H3000's debut album.
The videos are part of a single story in two parts. Running starts with the duo trekking across a desolate, wild landscape until we reveal a looming threat is on the move. While in Flames we go back 24 hours earlier to understand what the duo has taken and why The Hunters are so desperate to stop them.
Making the clips within an open world, real-time format meant we could embrace the serendipitous possibilities of this technology. And while some of the traditional creative processes stayed the same (eg. pre scripting and post editing) rather than tightly storyboarded shots and only creating to those moments, we created a more open journey route for the duo in the hope of finding unexpected moments along the way. Then the characters performances were 'played' through by Andrew, and screen captured to provide the rushes for Editor Adam Wills to shape.
The game spectacle provides a new kind of performance theatre, one that can be iterative, serendipitous and powerfully transporting!
We created an original, playable game, specifically made to film inside of to create two music videos for electro-duo H3000.
Designed and directed by Andrew van der Westhuyzen, and made in Unreal Engine by Collider's Technical Director Hugh Carrick-Allan, the storyworld environment features, epic vistas, giant toys and plenty of sci-fi touches.
Early concept tests by Andrew van der Westhuyzen.
Giant toys litter the landscape.
The Temple. The only safe place from the Hunters.
We modelled the duo’s bodies in ZBrush and used iphone face scanning software to capture their heads in a simple, low fidelity way to work in the game engine. While their bodies were mapped onto an existing Unreal locomotion ‘rig’ character that could be controlled by an xbox controller.
Luke Steele as intrepid interstellar rogue/explorer (a sci-fi Indiana Jones).
Run tests in full suit detail for Jarrad and Luke.
Modelling and final suit detail before Unreal Engine import.
The driving force for the Running clip were the Hunter characters. The Hunters were created to be absurd human-like entities - slightly comical and menacing.
The Hunters.
Given the project scale we had to be clever about how to reuse the game set. So we came up with a simple day night split between the two stories. This gave us vastly different atmospheres between the two clips - even though it was essentially the same set of parts.
The artefact beam.
Credits:
Director: Andrew van der Westhuyzen
Technical Director: Hugh Carrick-Allan
Support Modelling: Guy Robinson
Editor: Adam Wills
