Fully CG-animated music video was directed by Berlin-based directorial collective Polynoid and produced at Woodblock Animation Studio.
Production company Woodblock and Label Leisure System presented Polynoid’s latest music video for ‘Islands of Glass’ by Rob Clouth.
Director's Statement -- After hearing the music track for the first time, the production for this video started out as a simple test for Polynoid director Jan Bitzer to check out the effects of lasers bouncing off of mirrors in a physics lab-like environment.
Lasers, because that's what it sounded like.
After playing with the setup for a while, we started to animate a sequence, starting from the beginning of the track. This turned out to be a point-of-no-return moment, since after a couple of days of 'fun with lasers' it was already too late to stop. While plowing through some 7,800 frames of animation with only a pre-defined table of mirrors and lasers, the characteristics of the final video developed throughout the process of creating it. Nothing was pre-planned, designed or thought-through in advance. So when around frame 4,125 the beer-infused idea popped up to drop a heart onto the table, that's what it was. From there on, the heart was lying there and we worked with that.
As a true passion project, the video was produced on the side next to the commercial jobs in our pipeline. So it took quite a while to finish, but we're happy with the way it turned out and functions as a film supporting the music.
The project was created in Softimage, rendered with Solid Angle’s Arnold and composited in Nuke. The most demanding aspect was probably the length and amount of frames of a continuous, one-shot sequence to be handled in animation, rendering and compositing.
Source: Woodblock Animation Studio
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
