The Making of Impending Doom Music Video

Here is the making of my latest music video Impending Doom.

The first component on the video is the golden faceted skull. I mainly created this as a test of the new 3ds max modeling tools using polygon reduction and the topology tools to change from quads to reduced triangles.

I also rendered this in Vray with a gold and a matte black material. Vray has come out with a new version as well so I needed to test render settings and figured a shiny metal and a matte black would be two opposite spectrums to test out noise patterns and whatnot. As it turns out the new Vray is much easier than previous versions with way less artifacts.

This is my setup in 3ds Max. I took a standard skull model then reduced its polycount to make it look low res then I also extracted each edge of the polygons as a spline to add a subtle border on each face. I also surrounded the skull with four cylinders that had their polygons reformatted with topology tools to be at angles.

I decided to animate the cylinders so they would reflect on the shiny skull as they rotated 360 degrees in opposite directions.

This took forever to render at a large resolution. It is just 100 frames and I set the quality to render at 1 hour per frame lol. So it took 100 hours to render, but in the end I now have a high res video asset to use in later videos.

Now we move on to the soundtrack for the video. I composed the majority of the backing track in MPC while commuting in to work on the train. I have an mpk mini midi controller that fits on my lap with my laptop so its an easy way to burn commute time and be productive at the same time. The background track is composed of 8 tracks on an 8 bar loop. My plan was to have each part come into place over the course of a couple bars.

MPC beats is pretty good for getting the loops created but its not the greatest for mixing. I exported each of the tracks and imported them into Cakewalk to recompose the loops into a song. Cakewalk is also good for adding effects to the generic synth and drum sounds from MPC. Here I mainly used EZmix effects by Toontrack to liven up the tracks.

This is what the console looks like. Each track either has an effect on it or points to an effects bus.

I also added/remapped some of the MPC drums to EZ drummer to get a more gritty high resolution sound.

For the guitar I have stacked effects from both Bias FX 2 and Guitar Rig 6. Bias FX provides the clearer tone and Guitar Rig 6 has a lower wider tone to fill out the guitar part in the mix.

Now that the video and audio elements are done I have to mix them together in After Effects. This is my layer pallet from After effects where I have the audio track, the guitar video and the skull videos below everything. There is also a fractal video I rendered out previously layered over the skull loop to add a bit more motion.

Here is one frame of the fractal video overlay that I created in Jwildfire. This basically spins and rotates and adds a bit of opposing motion to the rotation of the cylinders from the skull animation.

Now finally here is the finished music video

That's all for now thanks for looking and listening :-)