WIth a very short turn around a small team of three artists and A LOT of cg elements, Lindsey Stirlings Til the Light Goes Out was one of the most challenging vfx projects I worked on to date.
This point in my career I was really balancing After Effects compositing in one hand and 3D simulations in Blender on the other. So the VFX lead for this video really put it on me to create a lot of CG elements and comp them.
First tackle was understanding the story, as the smoke that we see is almost a character unto itself. It comes in with a bang, gradually grows and slithers its way into shots more and more, and then swarms the view. Another big question was why didn't we just use stalk footage? Because it was never going match up with the behavior we wanted; at its heart, the music video is a fantasy story, the smoke is ethereal, its living, and we knew that any stock elements was just going to take us out of that.
In understanding that pacing and reviewing the footage, I discovered that there's a lot of quick shots that can make due with duplicate assets, and some shots that were more specific, while the undertaking was still challenging, this was a good lesson for me in organization and categorization. I knew what shots the CG smoke needed it's own specific assets, and which shots I could make general smoke assets for and reuse, and at some points I really had to get creative in after effects to get them working.
With all of that we ended up with a library of about 5-10 general smoke elements we could sprinkle in smaller shots, and a handful of smoke elements for more specific shots.
We were lucky to have some HDR's of the area to match the lighting of the smoke, and I created an effects preset for the other artists to use to easily apply the smoke elements to their shots.
Heres' a video breakdown of some of the shots and the techniques to generate smoke in Blender:
If you're interested in seeing more of my work here's a like to my reel: