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Fusion Powered Music
Video for NASA
NASA, which stands for North America South America is a new band being produced by Squeak E. Clean (aka director Spike Jonze’s brother Sam Spiegel). The band’s impressive line-up includes members like David Byrne, Tom Waits, M.I.A., Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O and Nick Zinner, RZA, the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Kool Keith, George Clinton, the Cardigans’ Nina Persson, and DJ Qbert.
Director Syd Garon, who had previously used Fusion animator Paul Griswold on the award winning feature film WaveTwisters, came to Fusion for assistance in producing the first music video for NASA. The music video would use paintings by LA artist Sage Vaughnsagevaughn.com, (Represented by: Galerie Bertrand & Gruner) as the basis for the animations. Sage produced dozens of original paintings in addition to existing works for use in the video. The paintings were scanned in at extremely high resolutions, then were painstakingly dissected for animation. However, director Syd Garon had many shots in mind that could not be accomplished by 2D animation methods. He turned to Fusion to design and animate shots that were impossible to create otherwise. In addition to these shots, Fusion provided 3D animated elements that were later composited into the final animation to further increase the feeling of depth in the shots.
The final music video premiered in LA at the Swerve Festival. Currently 3 additional animated music videos for NASA are in production. To view the video right-click and download the video to your local hard driveHERE.
This video highlights a technique known as non-photorealistic rendering. This is a technique where you use 3D animation technology to create animations or still renderings that are never intended to look realistic. This can range from cartoon-style rendering to pencil sketch-style rendering to animations that appear to be made out of clay. In a future issue of our newsletter, Timothy Albee will go into more detail on non-photorealistic rendering.
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Speaking of Timothy Albee, Fusion would like to congratulate Timothy for his work on Battlestar Galactica, which recently won an Emmy Award. As many of our readers know, Timothy recently signed on with Fusion but prior to that he worked at Disney and on the hugely popular Battlestar Galactica. Timothy is internationally known as a character animation expert as well as an expert on rendering 3D hair and fur. His film, Kaze Ghost Warrior, shocked the animation community when he revealed the entire project was completed by himself: Timothy was responsible for the writing, directing, voices, modeling, surfacing, lighting, animating and rendering of the entire film. He additionally wrote, produced and performed all of the music in the film. All of this while living in a 1 room cabin in the wilderness of Alaska. If you are interested in viewing Timothy’s demo reel, please