Music videos have evolved significantly since TRL. Last week, we were thrilled to come across a new release from Darwin Deez called Kill Your Attitude, where the perils of modern love take some truly bizarre emotional and technical twists. Love (literally) becomes a battlefield when Darwin’s angry girlfriend becomes the player in a first-person shooter, taking the central conflict to some vividly imaginative heights as she hunts him down for great justice.

As director Dent de Cuir (of Caviar Content) explained: “We thought it was interesting to design an FPS video game and use it as a narrative canvas to speak about little wars which occur during the lifespan of a relationship. Our original idea was to use video game footage and mash it up with in-camera footage, but very early on in the research phase we had a conversation with the lovely team at Ruffian – our post house for the project, who suggested Unity, a cross-platform game engine.

“Two hours later we had the software up and running and were doing location scouting in digital environments. Ruffian were crazy enough to jump into the idea of creating a custom video game to sit Darwin Deez in and just play with it. As directors, it was a privilege to work without any real constraints.”

Lurid, painterly details and intricate, swooping shots seemingly captured from the tops of skyscrapers were all within easy reach of the team’s Unity engine. VFX and CGI studio Ruffian Post-Production created the entire game from scratch in Unity, using our Core Assets to build out interactions and Mixamo for character design.

“We had all these first-person hand movements that we needed to achieve. So we were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we could use Leap Motion to do it?’” said Christopher Watson-Wood, Ruffian’s Head of CG and ECD. “We played around with it and it worked. Without Leap Motion, we probably would have had to hand-animate every first-person hand, and as a result there probably wouldn’t have been as many.”

In about two hours, Christopher was able to write a Unity plugin to export the camera data into After Effects. Once everything was rendered in Unity, the team composited their work as a separate layer in After Effects.

“In the future, we’d like to use the Leap Motion Controller as an animation controller, not for real time, but motion-capturing that data – and using it to control, like, monster’s tentacles or anything you want to assign an organic, custom movement to,” Christopher told us. “Traditionally, if you want to do motion capture, you do it full-body in a studio. Anything you can do on your desktop with a Leap Motion Controller saves a lot of time. I think Leap Motion easily fits into that kind of workflow where you don’t want to have to manually animate something with keyframes.”

Ruffian’s post-production team of four produced the experience in just a little over a month. With a feat like this out of such a short sprint, we’re excited to see what the future holds for projects out of this studio.

DARWIN DEEZ – KILL YOUR ATTITUDE
Label: Lucky Number Music
Production Company: Caviar Content
Director: Dent de Cuir
Post Production (CGI, VFX, grade, edit): Ruffian Post

CREDITS: Artist: Darwin Deez Label: Lucky Number Commissioner: Stephen Richards Director: Dent De Cuir Executive Producer: Ore Okonedo Producer: Rohan Scully PA: Tom Ralph Production Company: Caviar London DOP: Alexandre Icovic Post: Ruffian Post Head of CG / ECD: Christopher Watson-Wood Executive Creative Producer: Amanda Jones Lead Editor / Compositor: Harry Davidson Lead CG Artist: Toby Williams-Ellis Editor / Director of Kill Your Attitude Behind the Scenes: Jack Tew

For further press details about the video, please contact Amanda at Ruffian Post amanda@ruffianpost.com.