Creed Bratton - “Tall Grass” Music Video
A very psychedelic, surreal music video I made with Open the Portal for Creed Bratton. I was responsible for the entirety of the animated portions. I handled all rigging, animation, scene assembly, cameras, lighting, texturing, rendering, and a decent chunk of the sculpting and modeling. I brought on the help of several friends to help with a lot of the modeling as well.
Open the Portal was incredible to work with on this — not only did they handle everything outside of the animation, but they also gave tons of very helpful direction on the animation to help make the whole story feel cohesive and keep moving forward.
Modeling Contributions:
Liza Desya - Meadow landscape, trees, clouds, flowers, and sun. Ear tunnel, ear butterfly, various office assets
Kael Brandjord - Most assets for wizard dungeon scene — operating table, shelf items, stirring spoon, magical vats, shelf, potion bottles, gem, skull, dungeon stone walls
Matt Siegel (me) - Creed characters & outfits, guitar, fishes, eyeballs, ear character, ear wings for baby robot, cauldron, mouth tunnel, meadow grass, eye tunnel
David Mellor - Robot baby & robot parents
Nick Drivas - Big psychedelic eyeball creature
Rowan Tsiguloff - Eyeball bat creature
Full credits are the bottom of this page!
Some Fun Process Clips!
Eye Bat wing flapping animation test. Model by Rowan Tsiguloff.
A little procedurally animated fish that didn’t make it to the final. You can spot one of these fish in the fish tank in the office scene. Model by Matt Siegel (me).
Sped-up video of Medium sculpting for the cauldron and ear. Sculpting by Matt Siegel (me).
Sped-up video of Medium sculpting of the different weird fish models. The eyes were added later in Houdini. Most of these didn’t make it to final. Sculpting by Matt Siegel (me).
An older playblast of the eyeball creature scene. You can see how the fish were originally utilized. Creed really likes fish, but we ultimately decided to scrap them in favor of having more eyeball bats to feel more cohesive. This also has an older version of the Creed model
Flower → face morphing test. This was an older iteration of Creed’s face model.
Early animation test of the giant eyeball creature. Model by Nick Drivas.
Procedural jiggle tests on a young version of Creed that ended up not making it to final. This was for some close-up shots of him running through the grassy meadow.
An early playblast of Young Creed in action running through the meadow. Although this was fun, the motion was a little too disorienting, and ultimately we decided that it wouldn’t really read to the average audience member as a younger version of Creed.
We also tried using the adult version of Creed in this clip instead (with added teeth), but it still felt odd and a bit disorienting. Instead we opted to cut between some establishing shots of the meadow with no Creed. I also thought this would be cool to show how these cuts looked before Thomas Bailey (VFX Wizard) came in and helped stitch the different shots together and added some nice color grading. His VFX work was fantastic and really helped tie everything together!
Process video of sculpting Creed’s guitar in Adobe Medium.
Credits:
Produced & Directed by Open The Portal
Executive Producer: Landon Chase
Editor: Aron Fromm
Directors of Photography: Michael Newman, Robert Bennett
Animation: Matt Siegel
3D Modeling: Matt Siegel (@siegmattel.visuals) Liza Desya (@lizadesya) Kael Brandjord (@softcore.geometry) David Mellor (@mellomograph) Nick Drivas (@art.neeko) Rowan Tsiguloff (@yllwmlk)
VFX: Thomas Bailey
Drone pilot: Derek Slayton
Drone tech: Helen Ngo
Gaffer: Victor Ponce
Producer: Jason Milov
Producer: Aron Fromm
Makeup: Christina Guerra
Keyboard Player: Tim Hockenberry
Drummer: Matthew Hazelrig
PA: Travis Merendino
PA: Zack Wells
PA: Eric Bard
Special thanks to Elaine Culotti for the use of her beautiful home