Develop a visual identity in collaboration with the musician Nesbo and the original Artistic Director of the project Skema, for her album and media campaign.
Give creative and technical advices, create assets around her musical landscape, animate those for different medias.
A strong visual identity composed of a social media campaign, album covers and leaflet, music video and merch.
Blender, Houdini, Photoshop, inDesign, After Effects and plastic experimentations
Context
Client / Project owner
Nesbo
Skema
Brief summary
Nesbo is a french rapper, active on social medias and Lyon’s underground music scene. She approached Skema to colaborate with him around the visual identity and marketing strategy for the release of her new album. Skema contacted me to help him envision and produce the whole project, requiring specific skills in 3D.
Why this project matters to my portfolio
This 360 project was from beginning to end managed and produced by Skema and I, as a second experience in the music scene it made me grow from a graphist able to work on individual parts of a project to a pro-active person able to accompany the team to its goals, making the vision of the artist come true, with an eye on each parts of the project.
Constraints & Deliverables
Constraints
- Establishing a strong and global visual identity, meeting the artist's needs.
- A strong lack in technical apsects needed to realize the clip, learned during the process.
- Tight release schedule.
Deliverables
- Teasing videos
- Print artworks (posters, staff cards)
- Album covers
- Music video
- Merch (T-Shirts, posters)
Art Direction & Visual Intent
Visual universe
Introspective, infinite white scene with saturated liquid emotions contained in worn capsules.
My contribution to the direction
Colors and gradings, materials and aspects of the objects. Composition, effects and image look in CGi images and music video.
Pipeline & Process
Pre-production / Setup
A couple of meets with the artist helped us envision the project, during these we already started to gather references and propose ideas around the visual identity to aim our experimentations in the best possible way.
CGI / 3D Production
- Blender
- Houdini
Approach
I started by creating the assets, iteretating on the shapes and materials to meet the artist’s vision. Then I planned the whole simulations and rendering workflow, within the technical constraints of my hardware, searching in parallel the feasability of certain aspects.
Once everything was planned and written down to the finest technical details, I started iterating on the workflows with the artist’s feedbacks to create the best visual representation of her ideas.
Key technical decisions
- Asset creation in Blender for its ease of use and procedural shaders.
- Simulations on proxies in Houdini for its accuracy and stability, exported to centroids with attributes.
- Scenes recomposed in Blender via instancing and attribute unpacking for faster render times.
Color Grading
- After Effects
Approach
We shot the videos and rendered the CGi in RAW to get the widest range of data, we made a visual calibration with color sheets, then applied the creative LUTs with guidance from the artist.
Key color decisions
- Define the colors before the video and CGi production
- RAWs to neutral images, creative LUTs afteward
- Iteration with the artist to make the whole correspond her univers
Visual Evidence & Process
Media showing how the work was made, not only the final result.
