Role: Animation & Practical Effects
Client: Future & Metro Boomin
Studio: HumanPerson
Created: 2024

The team at HumanPerson Studio reached out to me for some work on Metro Boomin & Future’s Rolling Loud concert visuals. The primary brief was to embrace the elements of fire, heat and electricity. I set out on creating a mixture of virtual environments and practical effects for the 270 degree stage design, which surrounded the artists on 3 sides. Special thanks to Aron Johnson for believing in my practical FX mayhem and providing the creative direction to get our content on to the big screens.

PYRO ESCHER

The flaming staircase visuals for this song were created in Unreal Engine and used 3 virtual cameras to capture perspectives for each screen. The pyro effects are a Niagra particle system designed by M5 VFX. Each fire and light pass were output from Unreal Engine and edited to the music in Adobe After Effects. Some final color correction, glow and grain effects were added in Davinci Resolve.

METAL ORGANS

Staying in line with the heat theme, we experimented with using a heat gun on a mixture of gallium and ferrofluid. The gallium quickly melted and submerged. As the heat gun blew air on the ferrofluid, it revealed the unique organic structure of the gallium underneath. The effects were filmed on a black magic 6K camera and 50mm Zeiss makro planar lens.

TESLA COIL MAYHEM

I collaborated with Aron Johnson on creating a giant tesla coil for this song. Multiple passes were filmed of real lightning bolts using a desktop tesla coil and then Aron composited them into a 3D scene he created, giving the illusion that 3 large coils were sparking to the music.

MOVING METAL

This technique did not make it to the final cut unfortunately. It involved blasting sound waves from a speaker at a tray of liquified gallium, causing the metal to move into various patterns based on the frequency. A blinkinlabs LED tape was used to light the metal in sync with the music.

HDK-01 GLITCH PROCESSING

Another approach we tried out was processing all the practical effects footage through BPMC’s HDK-01 analog glitch module. The device uses RBG channels to scramble the video signal, generating tons of unique noise and temporal glitches. Most of the visuals were utilized as video textures, which we re-projected onto fog volumes in 3D software for the final output.

CREDITS

MB Creative: Lamar Taylor
Designed by: Human Person Studio
Production Designer / Show Director: Ben Dalgleish
Content Director: Aron Johnson
Creative Producer: Molly Leishman
Technical Director: Stephen Hedges
Animators: Peter Clark, Nicjuice, Dwarmoth.eth, Euphoric_co, Project_XIV, Aron Johnson,
Harleywrecks, Blacklake, Bagdelete, Tim Marriott, Osaki.png
Editors: Matt Cummer, c.veitch_, Tim Marriott, Osaki.png, Park Jasmini
D3 programmer: Dark Matter
Notch artists: Ryan_darkmatter
Lighting Director: Scott Schirmer
PM: Stephen Looker