STEP

If you’ve been following Grizzle for a while you’ll have seen us proudly flaunting our work for Ocean Wisdom. These earlier productions, both Drilly Rucksack & Tom & Jerry, were more traditional hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation and banging tracks in their own right.

Now for Ocean’s next animated music video STEP the style and direction have taken a considerably weirder oddball 3D vibe, enter OG Grizzle founder Tom Carpenter accompanied by our own 2D veteran Hannah Johnson for one dope project.

Method Man Colab

The video is a collaboration with Method Man, and if you know who he is, you’re probably old enough to remember the golden age of Hip-Hop, and when someone offers you the chance to work on a track with one of Hip-Hop’s greatest rappers, who was part of one of the greatest rap groups ever, it’s an absolute done deal.

Awesome 2D touch

The insanely grotesque and weird 3D work is Tom in his happy place, and we very much left him to run rampant, but the glue that meshes this all together is the genius work of Hannah Johnson.

There are no special effects here, it’s graft: (digital) pen on (digital) paper. Frame-by-frame overlays were added after the 3D elements were built and It’s magic what an effect it has on the mood, the style, and the overall enjoyment for the viewer. We meticulously matched the timing of as many lyrics as we could.

Real mouth overlays

Not just content with 2D drawn overlays but we supplied Ocean with a call sheet of all the main mouth shapes for different vowel and consonant sounds, which he posed for and supplied us with pictures. We then treated them and spliced them over the top of the 3D character’s mouth, timed to the lyrics of the music to great effect.

Tragically matching every frame to its appropriate mouth shape is pretty time-consuming, and sadly we didn’t have time to do more as we were pushed to hit the deadline.

3D Character Workflow

The most astute motion designers among you will see this is a Mixamo-fest. 

We used Daz3D for the body bases – a character called Collosal for both Ocean and Method Man. With some bodging, we managed to get these out of Daz and into Mixamo to apply animation and then into C4D for the rest of the lighting, etc. Coupled with Facegen inside of DAZ we were able to create realistic models of both Ocean and Method Man’s faces. We’d experimented with other tools but were faced with some compatibility issues.

We spent a LOT of time refining this to be customizable, however the specifics were lost to time and Tom’s memory. But, it CAN be done, but there are limitations.

This is what we managed to dredge up on the workflow.

Daz 3D

Apply Collosal character

Pictures into Facegen

Import Facegen data into Daz

Export obj out of Daz into Mixamo

Select desired animation in Mixamo and apply to character Mesh

Export from Mixamo to C4D as FBX

Use motion clips in C4D to link different animations together

Make an epic video..