Indie pop band The Extravagants (aka Laura Milligan and Mike King) engage Bay Area animation studio Little Fluffy Clouds to create a mystical “modern-day dreamscape” for their new track “Zero into Nine”.

LFC producer Betsy De Fries: “Laura and Mike came to us after having seen our climate action film, Yellowstone 88 – Song of Fire.

“In Deer Tribe Medicine and the concept of the Medicine Wheel there are 30 Sacred Laws and one of them is the Zero to Nine Law – the belief that there are only two numbers: Zero and One. Surrounding the One are Nine Aspects.

“In keeping with the birth and regeneration theme of the song, a darker palette of midnight blues, purples, and plums was applied. We enlivened that base with dynamic bursts of light effects and atmosphere to produce scatterings of dust or haze.

LFC director/animator Jerry van de Beek: “Normally what you see in a lot of music videos is the repurposing of scenes. That makes sense as most of the time the music also repeats itself but that was something we chose not to do on this production.

“We also wanted to make sure that the animation and image quality was the best it could be so the entire production was created in 4K Cinemascope.”

“We also wanted to make sure that the animation and image quality was the best it could be so the entire production was created in 4K Cinemascope. While it’s true that working in such a high resolution slows down your render times and compositing flow, the end result is so worth it as the images are crisp and rich.

“The lyrics are very interesting in that they convey emotion and I would even say some amount of anxiety. These are concepts that are hard to visualize.

“We didn’t want to make the mistake of trying to literally explain the meaning of the song so we looked for images to reflect and engender the same emotions and feelings and hopefully to even amply it adding to the mood of the music.

Aside from searching out the right images we still had to create a visual story that takes the viewer on a journey and one that matches the spirit of the lyrics. A bit like life itself, you don’t know what’s coming next but each event builds one on top of the other and life flows from one experience to the next.”
 

 
Artist: The Extravagants

Production: Little Fluffy Clouds
Director/animator: Jerry van de Beek
Producer/art counselor: Betsy De Fries

Toolkit: After Effects, Photoshop, Maya, VRay