Director Chris Milk recently asked us to create several shots for his innovative new music video “3 Dreams of Black”.

It’s a very innovative, cutting-edge film combining live-action, animation, interactive web-gl made in partnership with Google. It’s very cool. If you have Chrome and a decent computer system, check out the project here: http://ro.me

We had about ten days to create two major full cg shots depicting overgrown ruins of modern freeway and city skyline. Fortunately, we have been working on our own internal project called RUIN doing just these kinds of project. So a lot of our assets and processes were able to piggy-back over to the project, and ultimately, turn crank the shots out pretty fast.

We were there on location when the original reference footage was shot. Chris used a 16mm arri on kodak stock to capture the POV of the main character looking out the car. With that footage, we 3D tracked the shot, roto’d out the foreground car elements and re-inserted out cg environments. Then of course, we had to match the very lo-fi 16mm look of the original plates.

Below are a few examples of the originals along with the clean renders as well as a screen grab of Modo showing the heavy use of replicators and modeling involved.

Videos>> Graded and Ungraded

Original Plates>>

High Res Clean Renders

Modo Screengrabs>>