Soul Intent & Odyssia - Drifting

Drum & Bass producer & DJ Soul Intent (Alex Judd) asked me to make a video for his new track Drifting, the first release on his newest label Excursions, catering for the deeper, more experimental side of dnb & electronic music.

There wasn’t a massive amount of time to produce the video and as there was very little lyrically to hook onto I decided to try and visualise the music and beat in a more abstract way.  After listening to the track a few times I decided to use the title literally, having a chap floating through space and passing through nebulas which react to the music, it also gave me the opportunity to do space stuff, and I like space stuff.  As I wanted to feature Alex in the video in some way it made sense to have him as the lost astronaut asleep in an escape pod.

I used some photogrammetry software to build a textured three dimensional model of Alex’s head using 30 or so photos taken at various angles around him.  I also bashed together an escape pod model and locked him inside, ready to float past various planets and through nebulas / big colourful space cloud things.

Using the 3D model of Alex's head I was able to relight his face with various colours and intensities of light which changed in time to the track.  I also rendered out various "normal passes" of his face so that I could do some of this lighting in After Effects which was a much faster way to do it without having to do long 3D renders every time.

I also used this head model to animate clouds of particles using Trapcode Form which reacted to the audio and enabled me to twist and distort them using the surface of the head as a base.  I combined all these bits, along with various textures, stock footage and NASA imagery in After Effects, hand animating light flashes and colour changes to specific beats as well as various levels of particles which reacted automatically to the audio track.