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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 - Part Two
 
 

cliff face

  
Scene 10: The plane stops falling and starts flying. She goes up, but rather uncontrolled. The plane was easier to move in this scene because I was able to group it. The cliff-face was made as a single block of purple with holes cut out of it later using Boolean extraction. It took a long time to make because Boolean stuff can get a bit faulty in 3DS MAX – once you start cutting many holes in a block after a while it stops working properly and you have to fill the holes with flipped clones of the object you were trying to subtract. I also added a few spheres and handle-shaped objects – I was trying to make a surface which was interesting as possible with the geometric shapes. The cliff face doesn't represent any real object, it's just a boundary to the girl's unconscious mind. At the moment she is imagining things to be hard and inflexible, and the world is so much bigger than her it's intimidating.
 
Scene 11: The plane tries to get in line with the other planes but instead she goes into a spin and nearly crashes into a horizontal strut. This indicates the girl's unsuccessful attempts to find a place in this new world. The other planes represent people who are working as part of a system, people who have already found their niche in society. No one cares about her – everyone ignores her and won't give her a chance. Every move she makes results in failure, increasing chaos and the likelihood of destruction.
    The plane behaves rather unaerodynamically in the spin, and any plane expert would tell me that it's physically impossible for any plane to do that, let alone a 737. But since this is all metaphorical I'm not going to go out of my way to obey the rules of physics – I just want to express the chaos and turmoil in the girl's mind.
 


the kitchen (this one is 600 x 800)
 
 
this picture would be in the clip
if the camera were zoomed in closer
 

 
an early version of the girl with her orange top
Scene 12: The plane continues to fly erratically, and then we zoom in to tableaus of scenes from the girl's past life, embedded in the cliff-face. This is hopefully something unexpected, as a normal domestic scene would be out of place in this surreal aeroplane world. We see the girl standing in her dining room, then looking out the window, then with her boyfriend. These are the girl's memories – they show that her old life was boring and it was the same every day.
    For this scene I had to make feet for the man – I also had to model different clothes for the girl, including a skirt that looks a bit strange when she's sitting on the table. This scene took a long time to render because it had so much detail and so many lights. Each tableau had a light coming in from the side and one from the ceiling. Light leaks from one compartment to the next – this unfortunately means that the ceilings get darker as you go down, and the floors get lighter. I tried to reduce this undesirable effect somewhat by fading out the top light after the camera moves away from the top compartment.
 
Scene 13: The plane comes in for a very rough landing on a hard concrete surface. Originally I had intended to have a wing breaking off as well, but that detail was forgotten about until too late. This scene represents the girl hitting "rock bottom" – some sort of disastrous event which nearly destroys her emotionally, causing her to think she has failed. The plane's arc of descent was achieved by having it rotate around a non-central pivot-point a long distance away. I didn't use a gravity-simulator and collision-detection for the crash – instead I just applied a few sudden chaotic rotations and hoped for the best.I adjusted the position of the animation key-points so that they looked more realistic, then I added a couple of simple particle-emitters to create the illusion of sparks. After a test-render I realised that the plane spins around mid-crash for no apparent reason, as if it's hitting some invisible obstacle. So I added a little skyscraper in just the right spot, to make it look like the plane's slide was disrupted by that. The presence of a lone skyscraper is like an indication of what's to come – the first building of many.
 

this was in the video
 

the same scene, from the other way
 
 
Scene 14: The plane comes towards the camera, grinds to a halt, and then starts to melt. I really wanted to use the "melt" modifier for this, but for some reason it seemed to be missing from my version of 3DS MAX. So instead I used the "squeeze" modifier, which depresses the plane in a curved way as if some invisible giant were sitting on it. I also rotated the direction of squeeze over the course of time. The wing goes slightly underground but that's okay, 'cause I wanted to emphasize that this is not a real plane, it's just a metaphor.
 
Scene 15: As the plane melts further, a female figure rises out of it. This is a pivotal scene as it represents the girl's "rebirth" and the shedding of old preconceptions. At this point the plane symbolizes her emotional baggage and also the false notions she had about the entertainment industry – it melts because she is leaving her old ignorant self behind and starting a new life. She had to hit rock bottom in order to learn important lessons about herself. And in the background, a city starts to form. From this point onwards, as we progress from the nightmare to the happy ending, things become gradually less metaphorical and more real. To melt the plane here I used a non-uniform scale.
    The girl's head was the second head that I made, and I stayed up for a whole night making it. It was based on comic-book drawings by J. Scott Campbell, of a character named "Roxy" or "Freefall" in the comic book "Gen 13". The drawings were particularly suitable in that the girl has a look of shocked surprise, her eyes open wide. In the construction of this head I followed the tutorial a little bit but not as much as for the man's head, and I was doing my own thing which resulted in the girl's forehead having a strange kind of lumpy aspect. The tutorial also had a section about how to make beautiful flowing hair, and I also followed that very approximately, by creating polygons on top of the head then extruding the edges outward and downward in long flat planes, then making them less flat by splitting the polygons lengthways and adjusting the vertices of the split edges. The hair material had to be double-sided. It still looked like a piece of plastic draped over her head – I added some squashed spheres in an attempt to make a connection between her scalp and the hair, but you can't really see them.
 
 

reference artwork
(c) WildStorm Productions
 
     
the head half-made, with the
viewport rotated to show the
reference artwork
 
  
completed head minus hair
 
   

several rendered heads
in a row
 
    
the head while I was working on the hair
 
 
 
 
 

construction of the girl's body
 

I should mention that the naked
drawings were done by
Michel Roger.
 
I created the body much later. The tutorial had a section about making a body – I didn't follow it but I did use the same female-figure drawings that the tutorial used. What I did was, started with a cylinder (with lots of polygons), converted it to an editable mesh, squashed it a little and then scaled each section of the cylinder to match the dimensions of the girl's torso in the drawing. Then I deleted the top of the cylinder and joined the head onto it by a painstaking process of dividing polygons, moving vertices one by one and welding them together. The breasts were made by splitting certain polygons in the chest area and moving the vertices out, scaling various groups of points to make the breasts rounder then making them droop by grabbing the central nipples with "soft selection" and moving them down. Finally I smoothed the whole thing out by applying a mesh-smooth modifier.
    The legs and arms were just chamfered cylinders with taper added – I could have made a proper mesh and joined it onto the body with no seams, but I knew that it would be too hard to do realistically if I wanted the arms to move and bend. For instance, with the man I had his arms as part of his body-mesh and moved them by putting bones inside them and applying a skin modifier to bind the bones to the outside mesh. But the way his arms bent, it just looked ridiculous. The skin didn't fold in at the elbow. I didn't want the girl's arms to be like that, so I made each part of the arm as a rigid cylinder. I also flattened the wrists so that they would fit better with the shape of the hand, and I used the same hand as I'd used for the man. Then I made copies of the arms and modified them accordingly to make the legs. The torso contains bones, for the purpose of bending her at the waist and the neck. But when I bend her at the waist by rotating the lower-chest bone, I have to move the bone backwards as well, otherwise she gets a hideous crinkle in her stomach. In this scene, she starts in a squatting position and then rises up to a standing position.
    As for the buildings in the background, I applied animated modifiers like bend and noise to the buildings and reversed the animation keys so that the transformations happened in reverse. Also, you might notice that some of the buildings materialize from the top down – this is because they are emerging from the star-field which is on a giant sphere enclosing everything. The sphere moves back slowly, exposing the buildings. It was an accidental effect which I decided to keep.
 
 

 

the buildings
 
 
Scene 16: More buildings form, a wall transforms into a mountain, and the "HOLLYWOOD" sign arises out of the mountainside. This growth of the city means that something good is forming in the girl's life, and with her new knowledge she will be able to make progress towards something positive. As the city becomes closer to reality, so her own dreams become reality.
    The building which rises up with wobbling noise is the Citibank Centre, an actual building in Los Angeles although this version of it has less levels. After creating it I had to slice it into more polygons, otherwise the "noise" wouldn't have worked. Another building I had to subdivide was the one in the foreground, on which I used a "spherify" modifier. The mountain was the same mountain as the one from the beginning – it was created using a noisy radial gradient ramp displacement map which increases in strength over time. It has a coloured gradient map in the diffuse channel, which makes it brown at the top and green at the bottom. I think it also has a fractal noise bump map. And in this scene, the mountain not only grows but also rotates and changes colour.
    As for the Hollywood sign, I had to go searching on the net to get that special font. I made all the letters rise together, then I adjusted the keys of each letter individually to offset the timing of each one by a set amount. Later I realised that the Hollywood sign would appear too soon if I just had them stay in the same place while the mountain was forming, so I had to move them sideways as well. The result was not quite what I planned, but I decided to leave it alone 'cause it looked more interesting than if the letters just rose up vertically.
 
 
the girl (warning: 283k)
 
Scene 17: The girl walks towards us. Her hair and skin change colour and we see clothes on her. I really tried to figure out inverse kinematics to make this walk-cycle. I'll bet most computer animators who make human figures walking would use inverse kinematics. But when I tried it, the results were frustrating and confusing. The body parts were linked together in a heirarchical chain correctly, but since the legs and feet were rigid shapes instead of meshes with bones inside, I couldn't add end-affectors to the feet as the walking-tutorial specified. I still might have managed the inverse kinematics, but one of the thighs seemed to freeze up for no apparent reason halfway through the walk and it would refuse to rotate. It became so frustrating that I had to delete that whole leg and build it again, cloning it from the other leg. I couldn't be bothered setting up IK limits on the joints again when I might run into the same problem, so I decided to ditch IK and just use forward kinematics to make the girl walk. I selected each leg-element and rotated it accordingly, with the key-positions ten frames apart. After I had made four positions for each leg I was able to clone those keys several times to make the cycle repeat, but still I had to keep making minor adjustments. I did the same for the arms, which was much easier 'cause I didn't have to bend them and stuff. Finally I had the walk-cycle looking the way I wanted, and I changed some of the arm keys to make the girl raise her hand to touch her head towards the end.
 

look at that ear!
 
Scene 18: The man, again. He looks up, his eyes rotating back and forth, full of doubt and confusion. In this scene the man is beginning to realise that the girl is getting further out of his reach, and he's scared. Unfortunately my animation skills don't extend to changing his facial expression, so I have to indicate the fear by more subtle means.
 
Scene 19: Girl walks towards new car. This city contains about eighty-one buildings, nine blocks of nine. I made the eighty-one boxes and then adjusted the height of them in groups. About five different texture-maps were applied randomly to various boxes with several different styles of windows. Some of them were left as just boxes without windows. I added further variation by adding extra small boxes to the roofs of some of them – others had cylinders, poles and corner-blocks added. Some of the buildings were extra special, like the Los Angeles Library Tower which is a complex series of chopped cylinders with two different sorts of windows – I had to get several photos of that building in order to model the shapes correctly.


 
 
library tower
 

 
 

new red car
 
This scene also contains a new red car. The Ferrari photos that I worked from showed the car at an angle intead of side-on, and as a result the car's length ended up a bit too short. But the real problem with this car was that it took a long time to render. I don't know why – it's not a particularly complex object and it doesn't contain any complicated ray-traced materials. For some reason, when we see the car close up, it takes about one hour per frame to render. The early frames in this scene (without the car) took only about ten seconds each to render. So why does the car (in combination with the girl) slow things down so much? I tried a few techniques to alter the car to make it less difficult for the computer to render, but everything I tried had negligible time-savings at the expense of making the car look worse. At first this was a major headache because I thought I'd have to abandon the scene – I couldn't wait around for two days while the scene rendered, while I still hadn't finished the animating – this was about ten days from the deadline. And it was a really good looking scene. But then I took the Max file to the new PC at school and rendered it there, in groups of thirty frames each. At school it could render continuously while I worked on other scenes at home.
    In an early version of this video, the girl's legs don't start to move until about a second after she enters the shot. Someone pointed out to me that this was a little distracting. So I had to render that short section again and insert it in the second edit, but that didn't happen until after the deadline.
 

the billboard
 
Scene 20: Camera pans from a billboard ("Big City Living") to a sign on a building ("Bright Neon Lights"). The billboard was made in Photoshop and contains a render of the city with a sunset-sky from 3DS MAX's sky library, and a lens flare was added later. The word "NEON" on the building is a bunch of loft-objects, supposedly making it looking like a neon-sign. The word "lights" is luminous – I wanted to make it wire-frame as well, but for some reason 3DS MAX wouldn't let me do that. If you look closely at the building behind, you might be able to read the web-site address which is projected across it by a moving spotlight – gitchi.net. I wanted to slip my own web-site address into this clip somehow, and this seemed a good a place as any.
 
Scene 21: The man holds a phone-receiver in his hand. The phone receiver is another loft-object, as is the cord. I wasn't sure what was actually going to happen in this scene, but in the end I decided that the room should fill with noisy volume-fog while the camera moves, and as an afterthought I made the walls and ceiling grow, along with the window-frame which goes out of alignment with the window in the process. This is to indicate that the man's whole world is falling apart now that his girlfriend is gone.
 
 
the finished city

buildings before textures
 
Scene 22: The girl rides through the city in her car. The fact that she finds this car doesn't mean literally that she found a car in the street and decided to go for a drive in it – it means that she found a certain kind of lifestyle which would allow her to own a car like this. This scene didn't take nearly as long to render as the other scene with the car, because the car only had one light source shining on it most of the way and it was also smaller in the frame. In order to make it smaller I had the camera increase its field-of-vision when the car gets close.
 
Scene 23: The buildings from the girl's point of view as she rides down the street. This in the only scene in which I used "render effects" – the sun has a "glow" effect along with a "star" effect and a "ring" effect. All three disappear as the sun goes behind buildings – this is what is known as "occlusion".
 
Scene 24: The camera moves down the street, seeing first the Citibank Centre, then the Library Tower, then a giant wine-bottle, then a giant wine-glass. This is further indication of the girl's improved lifestyle. The lyrics say "She's gonna be a celebrity, and drink champagne all day". One would think a person who drinks champagne all day would have some sort of alcholic drinking-problem, but I don't think that's what the lyrics intended. The wine-glass has ray-trace reflection and refraction. It also has some sort of champagne inside it, though it's really just a section of the glass cut-off and scaled down to fit inside. The liquid doesn't have any ray-trace effects, it's just transparent. This scene took about twenty-two hours to render (it's rendering now, as I type this).
 

the wine glass in
a different milieu
 
 
the atrium when I was
mucking about with it
 
 
the atrium with textures
 

  		 
Scene 25: The girl gets off an escalator in the atrium of the library building. To design this atrium I only had one photo to refer to. So I was able to make it look vaguely like the real place, but I don't know how similar it really is, and I guess I never will. I also don't know the context of this scene, what part of the building it's in, what lies beyond the windows, etc. So if a person who knows the library building were to ever see this clip, they would say "That's not right!" But nevertheless I really like this scene, along with scene 27, because the architecture looks so grand and the girl would be awe-inspired to be in such a place.
 
Scene 26: Buildings. The camera elevates over the city, and we see the ocean and a plane flying by. This shows that planes no longer have the negative associations they had before.
 
Scene 27: The atrium, again.
 
 
 

the boat doesn't get much
of a showing in the video.
So, you won't see it
anywhere else but here.
 
Scene 28: Camera flies out to sea. We see the girl reclining on a boat with a wine-glass in her hand, then the camera turns to look out across the empty ocean as the sky turns black and the ripples subside. This scene had the longest rendering time by far -- the combination of the girl, the boat, the ray-traced wine-glass, the ray-traced ripples and the fact that it's a 467-frame scene, meant that it took 294 hours or twelve days to render. I didn't finish it until after the deadline -- this scene wasn't in the version of the film that I handed in. It was inserted in a later edit. In addition, it caused me further stress because the reflection of the boat is wrong -- in fact the main body of the boat doesn't reflect at all. This had to be due to an error in 3DS Max. I tried rendering that section again, using a work-around involving double-sided polygons, but this created further errors with the water jumping up unexpectedly in one frame and it looked even worse. In the end I decided to leave it -- no one really notices the faulty reflection, when it flashes by so fast.
    In the early version of the video, the one that was submitted to the teachers, there was a box-object with a photo of the band mapped onto it, in place of the boat. This was not a bad solution as it was quick-rendering and it's a nice idea to have all the band members on display. But it was not in keeping with my original artistic vision.
    I studied some photos of boats and made a new one based on a common boat design. Also for this scene I had to make the girl look less surprised and more demure. It was actually very hard to change her facial expression so that her mouth was closed. I did it after several messy attempts, but that was before I joined the head onto the body. So later I had to join the unsurprised head onto the same body, and that involved more painstaking vertex adjustment and welding.
 

 

 
 
Editing: The finished renders (uncompressed video) were more than seven gigabytes. In order to transfer them from my computer to the edit suite, I had to burn eleven CDs. The editing was done in Adobe Premiere and it was all done in one afternoon. In order to sync up the sound with the vision, I used a special audio-file with a prominent "click track" (the same one that the band uses in live performances) and I could see the wave on the screen in the edit window so I could count the clicks and align the scenes with them. Most of the renders were slightly longer than necessary, so I was able to fade one scene into the next where appropriate. After the editing was finished, I deleted the click-track and replaced it with the proper audio file which was exactly the same length. Premiere doesn't cope very well with .avi files – what that means is, if a project contains .avi files, you can work on it but if you close it it can never be opened again. So, after learning this the hard way, I made sure to keep the file open the whole time until the final movie was exported out. I then recorded the movie on two different miniDV tapes and dubbed them onto two different VHS tapes.
    This music-video project went very well – it may have run behind schedule, but in the end it was finished by the deadline and the visual appeal of the images was just as good as I hoped. If all goes well, this video will be shown on TV and the publicity will aid the band's promotion. And when people see it, maybe they'll think "oooh, that must have been expensive to make." And they'd be completely wrong.

 
 
 
 
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