Jacob Collier's Ocean Wide, Canyon Deep, Fan animation

Characters

Creatures

Sets

Props

• fingerprint Who are you?
  Hi there, I'm Stéphane from laei animation.mood
  I'm a 3D artist and filmmaker from middle of nowhere, France.
  I am also a classically-trained counter-tenor and I am obviously a huge fan of the animated series Arcane, from League of Legend. If there is a Jacob Collier song in Season 2 I'm going to flip out!
• palette Why would you do this?
  Aha! Good one! Well, I'm an idiot.
  The long version, is that I wanted to make a project to prove to myself that I was capable of making more creative music videos than the ones I used to be paid to make.
  It turned out to not only be almost unfeasable (it took about 3 years of full time work to get that result) but it was also perfectly financially unsound and nobody would ever pay one guy 3 years for a 5-minute long animation... this is madness.
  But I always considered that doing 3D animation was like dreaming outloud: an opportunity for sharing with other the wonderful pictures that are in my head.
  I'm truly grateful I got to complete this absolute bonkers project and share with all the good people of the internet that one singular dream of mine.
• library_music Why choose this song?
  The first time I listened to Ocean Wide, Canyon Deep, I was hooked. I saw pictures, I heard a story. It felt like a good song to animate to, and more over, there was no music video for it.
  Furthermore, Jacob Collier's music is so rich and so detailed I have listened to this song probably a million times and it still keeps on revealing itself to me. Never got bored of it, not once! So good choice of song to spend that long with!
• replay Will you make another one?
  No. Hell no!
  This animation took 3 years of my life. It was an amateur project so I had no founds, and often very little other motivation than to see if I could make it.
  Truth of the matter is, I would love nothing more than to do that professionally and it seems far fetched now; however I would love to create and direct an episode of Love, Death & Robots or a music video for Riot Games.
  I honestly would enjoy creating another music video, being for Jacob Collier or another artist. But it is just a dream, honeslty.
  Realistically, this might just be my last project on this scale and I may never get asked to do anything but simple small scale projects, unforturnately.
• reply_all Can you make my song next?
  I get asked that often. Short answer is "probably not".
  Long answer is if I was to put a price on the time, the hardware and the software used to make this animation, it would probably cost around €150,000.
  Remember as well that it took more than 3 years from first concept to finished product. So, that's why the short answer is no. I'm sorry. Wish I could, really.
• timer How long did it take you to make the music video?
  It took me 3 years of work. There is 60 shots in the animation.
  Had I used only a One core processor, it would have taken more than 1,296,000 hours to render (low estimation) -- that's about 150 years.
• favorite_border Who are your influences?
  Now! That's a great question, thank you for asking!
  As music-video go, I have a few people (or group of people) I really look up to (in no particular order): David Fincher, the Fortiche team, Michel Gondry and the great Ben Hibon. An honorable mention goes to Jean-Pierre Jeunet who taught me that a good "movie" was like having a good idea every 10 seconds.
  As cinemtographers, I love, just love, Roger Deakins (who doesn't) and Matthew Libatique.
• apps What software did you use?
  Mostly I used Autodesk 3D Studio Max 2018 for modeling, texturing, animating.
  As a bone system for rigging, I used the built in CAT.
  As a render engine, I used Chaos V-Ray Next.
  Cloths were modeled using Marvelous Designer and simulated in Max using the old Cloth modifier (I like pain!)
  Water was simulated using Realflow.
  Particle systems are all using the Beta version of Tyflow.
  Texture painting was done in Adobe Photoshop, and in some occasion using a pencil on paper and Illustrator
  Compositing was done in Adobe After Effects
  Editing was done in Adobe Premiere Pro.
  Final Color grading was done in BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve.
• computer What hardware did you use?
  That is going to inspire terrible pity but
  most of my time was spent on my old workstation: an Intel Corei5 2500 with 24Gb of DDR3 and an Nvidia GTX750TI.
  I also have 3 HPe Proliant DL380 G7 servers that I bought second hand and which handled the bulk of the rendering on this animation.
  
• ondemand_video Has Jacob seen this?
  Yes, he did. He was very gracious about it. You may find his comment on the YouTube video!