Director Kays Al-Atrakchi created the VFX for French EMD artist Olivier Orand’s new music video, Thursday Night. Orand is best known for his 2018 Electronica album Human.
The Thursday Night music video requiring more than 260 VFX shots. Orand appears only briefly in the video at the very end, the film centres around the performance of actor Augie Duke. The clip is extremely visual and fast-paced, but shot in a very moderate studio. Al-Atrakchi and the team used Houdini, Fusion Studio and DaVinci Resolve Studio for the majority of the video’s VFX, editing and grading.
The entire spot was pre-vized and planned out with early simple renders. This included early Blackmagic Pocket 4K cameras tests and test composites.
The green screen shoot, live action for Thursday Night was filmed on the BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, by DOP Steven Strobel. The piece was fully written, directed and produced by Kays Al-Atrakchi.
The set was based on Sci-Fi Kit bash panels by Oleg Ushenok. The texturing was done in Substance Painter, in sync with Affinity Photo. These kit bash pieces were incorporated with assets from Black Chilla Studios and also used Assets and textures from The French Monkey. The use of these asset bash kits and online textures allowed for fast assembling of the futuristic environments. The main goal was to allow the team to easily build scenes without spending hours and hours on the basic environment, so they could polish the piece and focus on details and finishes. The Production Design and Costumes were by Krystyna Łoboda.
Derek Drouin edited the piece. The final Edit, final color grade and mastering done in Blackmagic Resolve Studio 16. The music video highlights how far the Blackmagic tools have come, especially in the area of editing and integration of visual effects.
The team used the Video CoPilot Motion Design tools for the film clip’s visual UI. The team extensive researched and built a library of reference material to inform the design and the graphical language of the film and its overlays. CGI Modeling, Simulation was done in SideFX Houdini. The 3D scenes and environments were rendered using the Redshift Renderer. The compositing was all done in Blackmagic Fusion 16.
