Hotknife produce pop promo for web based scheme

Nottingham based Hotknife Digital Media have just completed a pop promo for Lex records artist Boom Bip.
The track, 'Mannequin hand trapdoor I reminder', was run as part of a Warp records/ Four-minute wonders website scheme.
Simon Wallett and Andrew Whitney wrote the brief, inspired by the rhythm of the track. Wallett said: "It instantly conjured up images of clockwork objects and so we chose to create a world inhabited by wind-up toys. It also had a darker undercurrent for which we created an old forgotten robot toy-maker who creates and plays with the clockwork world at night."
Created entirely within 3dstudio max, the animation was rendered through ART's Pure card. Wallet continued: "The pure card gave us the ray-traced look essential to the scenes both for materials and lighting, which is unavailable though Max’s default renderer.
"For some shots we needed to combine the CG animation with video 'chroma' shots of the toymakers face shot in the studio. The footage was tracked, keyed and placed as a material over a 3d generated mask."
The whole animation was then grained and graded before being edited as the final piece.
The whole project took Hotknife about six weeks, and Wallet concluded: "We burned the midnight oil as we had not only to write, storyboard, build, animate, render and edit the animation, but also squeeze in our usual client work as well."
(GB)