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This page was written and designed by Stephen Clark of gitchi.net.
 
 
The Making of The Girl I Love Video Clip 2002
 
In 2002 I created a music video clip for the band "Positronic", of which I was a member. The video project was also an assignment for the course that I was doing in Electronic Design and Interactive Media at Swinburne TAFE. It was a 3d Animation created totally inside the computer, using the software "3d Studio MAX". It took fifteen weeks, and in accordance with the course rules I had to draw up a work-schedule and plan out the storyboards before I did anything else.
The finished product is too large for web-download. But, what I can do is present to you this page which documents the making of the clip. It contains many pictures of screen-grabs and test-renders. And, as a special treat, all the little pictures link to larger pictures when you click on them.

 

here's a nice picture
 
The song "The Girl I Love" was written by Grainger Lock and Mishka. It's a song about a girl who decides to leave her small-town home, hoping to find fame and fortune in the big city, namely Los Angeles. This decision takes her away from her boyfriend, who is allegedly consumed with "endless self pity". Her boyfriend is still in love with her, so presumably the departure would hit him very hard. In the lyrics he doesn't really talk about his feelings about the situation. My take on the song is that the full reality of his girlfriend's absence hasn't fully hit him yet, and he can't believe she's really gone, but near the end he says "She's gonna be a celebrity and drink champagne all day", so I guess he's beginning to realise that he'll never see her again – maybe he got a postcard from her saying that she's had an offer from a movie studio or something. Or maybe they had a fight before she left, and he's already lost hope that she will come back and marry him. Either way, the boyfriend is a figure of deep despair whose self-esteem would have taken quite a beating by the whole chain of events. The girlfriend is a figure of optimism and success, leaving behind the past and finding a new career of which she had been dreaming for so long.
 
this was in the video
    My first plan when making this music video clip was to show the man in his house, singing about his girlfriend, interspersed with scenes of the girl driving to Los Angeles and seeing the sights of the city. But when it came time to draw a proper storyboard, I had to flesh the idea out with more scenes. At the same time I was learning more about the software "3D Studio Max" and what could be done with it, and I had to shape my ideas around that. With all the beautiful effects that can be achieved with 3D graphics, it would be a shame to just create pictures of semi-real objects behaving in a conventional way, like a car driving along a road. So I decided to incorporate some surrealistic elements, creating a world where some of the imagery represents the girl's feelings on her journey to Hollywood in a metaphorical way.
 

the man's room, half done
 
    I had fifteen weeks to do this project. It consisted of four processes:
1. Learning the software. I had very little experience with 3D Studio Max – most of my 3D work in the past had been in "Lightwave" and "Infini-D". According to my schedule, the first two weeks were dedicated solely to going through the tutorials in the manual. I didn't have time to go through all of them, but I learnt a lot from the ones I did go through. The process of software-education was constant right throughout the project, both during the project work and my own side-experiments.
2. Modelling, or creating my own 3D objects. At the beginning I made a list of objects that I needed. The list looked like this:
 
 
 
1. Ground
2. Three simple buildings
3. Country Homestead
4. Windmill
5. Fence
6. Road
7. The man: head, hat, chest, arms, hands
8. Table
9. Photo frame
10. Old car
11. Road signs
12. Eye(s)
13. Aeroplane
14. Cliff face
15. Window
16. Door
17. Lamp
18. Girl's face, hair, chest, arms, legs,
    feet, (hands), bones
19. Library Tower building
20. Citibank Centre building
21. Fifteen other random buildings (just blocks)
 
 
 
22. Hollywood sign
23. Sportscar
24. Two billboards
25. Phone
26. Bottle with label
27. Wine glass
28. River boat
29. Tree trunk
30. Umbrella
31. Bridge
32. Atrium of Central Library
33. Boat
34. Small table
35. Deck chair
 
 
Items 28-31 were later dropped because they were part of the "San Antonio Riverwalk" scene, and I later realised that San Antonio Riverwalk is not in Los Angeles as I had originally thought.
    The modelling process was supposed to take seven weeks. But like everything else in this project, it took longer than expected and I was continually making new models and revising old models long after the modelling period was supposed to have ended.
 
3. Animating. Somehow when I was arranging scenes I got caught up in animating them as well, too early in the project, and the early animations were rough and badly timed so I had to redo them later. The animating was supposed to be finished three weeks before the deadline – but instead it wasn't finished until about five days before the deadline.
 

This frame had the
longest rendering time, at
nine and a half hours.
 
 
4. Rendering. This part was supposed to be done after all the animation work was finished. But as the deadline approached I realised I would have to do the animating and rendering concurrently, animating in the daytime and rendering mostly at night. For the most part renders took only about three hours per 155 frames, which was quicker than expected. But then some scenes were extra complex and took more than forty-eight hours to render, and those were the scenes that really freaked me out 'cause they were rendered so close to the deadline.
 
 
screenshot showing the path of the camera
 

the house half built
 

the opening, rendered from
the perspective viewport
 
Scene 1: This scene features moving hills and rippling earth, and it introduces viewers to the concept of a clip where unnatural "magical" things happen. I also wanted the scene to convey the enormity and emptiness of the country. The rippling ground was the first thing I made, despite my plan to do no animation until later. I did a few tests with sweeping the camera across the landscape as it formed into hills using a noise displacement map, but it was really just experimentation and I later scrapped the model in favour of a much larger and more elaborate one. I put mountains in the middle of the scene to add variation to the horizon-line – the way they are positioned hides the fact that the whole landscape is a rectangular plane with edges and corners, instead of an infinite plane which it's supposed to look like.
    The house (the country homestead) was one of my first models and it gave me some good early practice at Boolean extractions. It was based on a photo of a country house that I found on the internet. The windmill was built much later – it was made of a material that rendered as a wire-frame. I added a water-tank beside the windmill, just because the windmill-photo that I was working from showed a water tank next to it.
    This scene is the longest one in the clip, so I rendered it in two parts so that the file wouldn't be too large to transport. After I rendered this scene, someone pointed out to me that the camera-movements were a bit rough and jerky in places, where they should be smooth. I fixed this up by changing the camera to targetted camera, where I could change its rotation by changing the position of the target and have the target moving smoothly.
 

 
 
 
halfway through the head-making process
Scene 2: I wasn't sure if I could model a realistic human face in 3D – my previous attempts at making a head were a little cartoony. But I became more confident after I read one of the tutorials at www.3dtotal.com. It was a step-by-step guide on how to build a human figure from scratch, using a photo or drawing as a guide. It was so clear and useful that I downloaded the whole tutorial piece by piece to my hard-drive, so that I could view it offline. I had a few photos of my friend Grainger (that I'd taken myself for publicity purposes), and two of them happened to be perfect front and side mug shots. So I used them as the basis of my male-head-model. In accordance with the tutorial, I mapped the photos onto two flat planes and positioned them at right-angles to eachother so that I could use the photos as a guide while I built the head, slowly and painstakingly, polygon by polygon. The ear was created separately and joined to the head later, though I didn't manage to attach it completely seamlessly as the tutorial would have me do.
 

half the head, smoothed
 

the ear construction
 

I modeled his chest first
before I added clothes
 
 
    The hair was made with random experimentation with twisted lathe objects. If you could see his head from the back you'd observe that the hair looks completely wrong from back there. As for the body, I made the chest and the shirt by the same process as the head, except with less attention to detail and without any photographic reference. The hand was built using my own hand as a template – it's a little plain and flat without any bumps at the knuckles because hands are so difficult to model. They can take up a lot of time if you do them properly – I could have filled it with bones to make the fingers move realistically, but that seemed unnecessarily time-consuming. As for the legs, they were even plainer (just cylinders) because I figured no one would really notice them.
    The man stands in a room with a table, a bottle, a photo frame, a cupboard and a poster featuring pictures of Grainger and Mishka. They were all fairly easy to model. The textures on the wallpaper and table were taken from 3DS MAX's standard texture library. The sky, like all the skies in this clip, was taken from a photo of the sky that I took. If you look closely you might see a group of tiny audio adaptors on the table, which I put there for reasons which I've forgotten – possibly because I was still thinking of the man as "Grainger", who would use audio adaptors in the course of his music making, but this man is supposed to be a fictional character.
    The camera is stationary in this scene, but its field-of-view narrows over time similar to a zoom lens.
 
Scene 3: Close-up of the postcard in the man's hand, which says "Los Angeles California". This is one of the worst scenes in the clip because his wrist twists in an unnatural way. It's also the only scene which could be a copyright infringement, because I didn't design the postcard myself and I don't know who designed it.
 
 


the ear being attached
 
 
early render without hair
 
 
preliminary work on the hand
 

 
more hand-work
Scene 4: The man lowers his hand and backs away from the window. The camera moves out the window. After I made this scene I had an idea that I could continue moving the camera out the window across the lanscape and blend it in seemlessly with the next scene. I made an attempt at it but it was too hard. The sky is mapped onto a very large sphere which surrounds all the other objects – the camera would have to move a very large distance and would thus end up outside the sphere. I could move the sphere with the camera, but it wouldn't be a realistic effect as you'd see bits of land emerge from the sky as they enter the sphere. I tried making the sphere grow as the camera moves, but it was too hard to keep the clouds the same size.
 
 

 

the uncool car
 
 
Scene 5: A car drives along a road. The ground in this scene was made by a different process from the ground in the first scene – it was made using a hand-made displacement map which I designed in Photoshop. The road was designed later to fit with the landscape. It doesn't sit perfectly on the ground – it's slightly above, but you can't really tell because its shadow is turned off. I wanted to have proper white lines on the road, but couldn't be bothered because it was too tricky with the curves.
    The car is vaguely based on a picture of a Type 3 Volkswagen, though a little more boxy to emphasize that it's not a "cool" car. There is also a sign in this scene which says "Fame 10, Money 15, Respect 35", a humorous variation on highway signs which show distances – it's symbolic of the girl's optimism.
    Instead of having a normal texture-map applied, this landscape has an image of a noise-map projected down onto it, slide-projector style. The reasons for this become evident in scene 7. It proved to be a bit of a problem because the light from the projection interferes with the shadows from the normal light. But maybe no one will notice.
    If you look closely you might see that one of the roadside poles is above the ground (not touching its shadow). I decided not to fix this error because it's barely noticeable and the pole disappears behind the sign after a moment.
 
 
the driving scene from a distance
Scene 6: The car continues. This is where I filled up time by having the camera zoom around a bit. It also gives us a chance to see the number-plate, which is "M15-HK4", a play on our lead singer's name. I also made some rough trees, using bent cylinders for branches and noise-affected spheres for leaf-canopies.
 
Scene 7: The car continues and a pair of eyes rise up from the earth. I'm not sure what this represents – some sort of higher power which is keeping an eye on her and is about to throw some obstacles in her way. The way they rise up from the earth indicate that this powerful entity is "of the country" and therefore also represents the townsfolk who would probably not like the way she turned her back on her past and her family and friends.
 

the texture that was projected
 

 		  
    The difficult part was getting the lump to rise up from the earth. The ground was far too coarse a mesh to put a displacement map on and make it look like a smooth lump at that scale. So, I made a smaller mesh (a lathe object) and placed it on top of the ground. Then I could make it rise up at the appropriate time by scaling it along the Z axis. But how could I get the texture on this object to match up seamlessly with the rest of the ground? The only way, that I could see, was to use an image projected down onto the ground by a giant spotlight, as mentioned in scene 5.
    The eyes are spheres with an eye-texture on them – the lashes are separate objects made using a sphere-slice. The nearby fence breaks as the lump rises – I was trying to use inverse kinematics to distort the fence but it didn't really work. Also, at the last minute I added some rocky edges to the road – it was an improvised solution to the problem of the car's shadow falling on the ground underneath the road, but it looked pretty cool so I used them in the next scene too.
    If you freeze frame as the car goes past you might be able to see the silhouette of the girl's head in the driver's seat. The rest of her body wasn't built at that stage – there's just a chamfered box or something to represent her shoulders.


 
cliff face
 

 
the plane with its diagrams

  		 
Scene 8: The car drives off the edge of a cliff. This represents the girl's dive into unknown territory. She is totally unprepared for what's about to happen so it could be dangerous and terrifying. The lyrics of the song don't mention any problems or misadventures that the girl experiences on the way to her destination (on her metaphorical journey to success), but it would be unrealistic to assume that it was all smooth-sailing when she's attempting to start a show-business career in Hollywood after leaving her small-town life. In fact, the most likely outcome of such a plan is that she would "crash and burn". This is the start of a dark section of the clip, in contrast with the bright sunlit scenes of the country, to show that the girl is in trouble, temporarily.
    This scene shows a dark chasm containing many, many aeroplanes flying in formation. I made one aeroplane and repeated it many times. The model of a plane was based on a diagram of a 737 which I found on the internet, showing the front and top views. On the side of each one is an image map of plane-windows and doors. This scene also contains a couple of giant wire-frame rectangles subdivided into squares – they move across the chasm at different levels, representing more dangerous obstacles which the girl is in danger of colliding with unless she's careful. As the car falls, it falls out of the sunlight and into the shadows – an effect which I didn't really plan but I'm glad it looks the way it does. Meanwhile the blue sky fades to black.
 

the windows map for the special plane

 
 
 

some house pictures which I
couldn't squeeze in before
 
Scene 9: The car morphs into an areoplane. I wasn't sure how I should do this – both the plane and the car are complex objects made up of many different components and materials, so a regular "morph" modifier wouldn't do the trick. Instead I decided to hide the aeroplane inside the car and have it emerge (grow) while the car shrinks. But I knew that it would look better if each component of the car was treated separately, with the wheels shrinking, the body elongating, the tail-lights flying off, and finally the whole thing being overtaken by the plane fuselage. Conversely the plane had to start off at the wrong size with the wings in the wrong proportions and change into a proper aeroplane. This involved placing the plane inside the car and shrinking the individual parts down one by one, then reversing the order of animation keys to make it happen backwards. To further smooth the transition I had the coloured materials of the car change slowly to white. The result was a complex jumble of animation keys for rotation, position and scale for many different objects. Then I was faced with the problem of how to make the whole thing fall together, while still keeping the position keys for each object. There was an easy solution which became clear to me later, but at the time I found a much harder solution which was to make the cliff-face rise. Later I found a way to make the whole thing spin while it morphed – by linking all the car and plane components to an invisible parent object and rotating that.
    The plane now represents the girl – she adapted to her new environment in a hurry by imitating the people around her and looking like them (the other planes). She doesn't have any experience in flying, but now that she has grown wings she at least has a chance of survival.
    (Note: this documentary is in two sections. Click on the link below to go to the second part.
 

 
 
 
 
part 2
 
Images and words on these pages are in the public domain. They may be copied and distributed freely.