These sequences and stills were made in development for the WALKER. project. WALKER. is an ongoing project of musician Sean Walker and these visuals were made as part of a broader collaboration that includes his work as well as the visual work of cinematographer Dave May.
The above production reel features final sequences as well as stills from our research and development phase. Disclaimer - The audio is not the work of Sean Walker, but is instead my attempt at creating sound design to match this development diary. As WALKER. releases work later this year, I will provide an update with Sean’s much more beautiful audio and our final cut of the visuals.
The brief for my portion of the collaboration was visually represent death. Fairly big concept. After beginning with a very broad exploration, I settled on three visual approaches; shrouding, disintegration and regrowth. These concepts were anchored by the human form. Male and female models served as a base to drape in cloth, transform to cloth, disintegrate and grow foliage over.
Without colour, dramatic lighting was important to define the features of each model. Most compositions ended up using a single light setup - often with a reverse key light or overhead placement. Reverse key lighting was particularly effective during disintegration sequences as light could bleed through the decaying model.
The main tools of production were Houdini, Cinema4D and Blender. Houdini was used for all cloth and disintegration simulations, Cinema4D for the majority of lighting / rendering and Blender for sculpting, rigging and posing.
Post production was then handled in Adobe After effects. Certain shots were treated with additional VFX to smear models across the composition or push the abstract nature of the scenes through pixel sorting, mirroring, blurring, etc.
