Referencing the op art of Victor Vasarely, London motion designers Paul Plowman and George Dyson (aka Greedy Goons) craft an intricate, hypnotic, and technically challenging music video for the electronic musician/producer Testset.

George Dyson: “As the majority of the creative content for ‘Honeydew’ was complete before Paul handed the project over to me, I had a ton of reference to adapt and remix.

“I really didn’t want to change Pauls’ work too much, so I endeavored to tighten up the audio sync and create more distinct compositional sections that mirror the emotional and tonal shifts in the music with a somewhat synaesthetic touch.

“The sheer scale of this project was the most challenging aspect; each new musical section contains dozens of new animated elements that all need to sync exactly to Testset’s syncopated rhythms – there were several hundred layers in total which took weeks of painstaking keyframing.

Each musical section contains dozens of new animated elements that all need to sync exactly – there were several hundred layers in total which took weeks of painstaking keyframing.

“In addition to the project’s size, 95% of the animated elements were driven through a Trapcode Form system to get the distinctive scaling polka dot particles, a very cool system that Paul set up, but which also proved to be a processor-intensive workflow with 12-hour renders for the full six-minute HD export.

“To circumvent these preview and render times, I committed all 128GB of my system’s RAM and 200GB of NVME disk cache to After Effects. This helped, but wasn’t enough, so I ended up pre-rendering layers as Prores4444 clips and then re-importing them to circumvent the Trapcode Form calculations entirely.

“It was a real pleasure to collaborate with both Paul and Testset on this hypnotic beast of a project, and I am beyond elated that we finally realized a full-length AV animation for my good pal, Testet!”
 

 
Artist: Testset

Director/animator: Paul Plowman, Greedy Goons
Artwork: Dominic Dyson