The Week From Hell
The first music video for Mudvayne quickly became a sleepless nightmare!
There is a rule of production: 'Good, Fast and Cheap; you get to pick two, because it won't be the third one'. I have been a subcontractor of the Guerrilla Wanderers, an LA production company currently working out of the New Jersey/New York area. They hired me to do some animation and 3D work. I was very excited to be a part of this project and to work with the Guerrilla Wanderers. I had seen their work before, and had previously been tempted by another job with them.
The Mudvayne music video project is a set of 3 music videos. They are, in fact, a 3 act play so to speak. Each video tells a part of a bigger story. It's a great concept for music videos. For reasons that only they and the recording label know the first video to be done was Act 3. It is also the only one that was getting rapid posted to MTV. Personally, I didn't know that MTV was in the music biz anymore. I thought they got out of that in the early nineties and changed into the juvenile-shit channel, keeping only their original station identifier. Who knew?
Anyways, the first video had a rather strict deadline. Perfectly understandable. They were scheduled to shoot from December 3rd to the 5th. This three days of shooting would encompass all three videos. Even before they started shooting I had been trying to do a bit of my own pre-production. Much of it was misguided, starting with things that we still haven't gotten to yet, and not having enough information to start on any other really important aspects for the third act.
It took them several days after shooting to get their Red rushes back (that's the conversion process from RedCine footage to something that can be used in the editing software), and then several more days to start working on an edit lock. I was able to get a few still frames out of them to start doing some mock-ups and testing; a little R&D. Unfortunately, all of the R&D shots that I got were from the very first part of the third act, and didn't really encompass much of the end of the video.
It was probably the 9th before I started getting any footage. I don't recall exactly. Everything turned into a big long blur after that. The final deadline for all shots was about 5 o'clock New York time on the 15th. I got to work immediately. They had broken this video into three sub-acts. The first one was moths, the second one was a pixie and the third one was the final destruction sequence. The first batch of footage I got was all the stuff relating to the moths. Fortunately, I had been doing all my R&D on the moths for a couple of days and had some good stuff lined up for them.
The first day of actual production I worked for about 18 hours. The second day I realized that wasn't enough, so I worked 20 hours. The third day I worked 20 hours again and started to get the moths shots nearly done. Once again on the fourth day I got in another 20 hour day and crashed for four hours before I really got thrown into the bowels of hell. On the fifth/sixth day I worked for 44 hours straight; no sleep. I had dosed myself with several Five Hour Energy drinks and many pots of strong coffee, as well as a regiment of talking to myself and slapping my own face to stay awake.
Unfortunately, by this time we started to get into shots that I had no R&D for. This meant trying to come up with how to do the shots while simultaneously doing the shots. There was no time for checking my work, no time for trying something new... the good, fast and cheap rule was starting to come into effect... good being the odd man out. I got four more hours of sleep before starting the next 20 hour day.
In the end we got over 40 complex VFX shots done in a little less than a week. I spent over $250 in rendering costs and had all of my machines working overtime to handle the rest. The producer did manage to buy us a little time to do some spit and polish, which was really good because so many shots went out with only one pass at them and the quality was suffering almost as much as I was. Fortunately, the Wanderers were able to take the rush job animations that I was giving them and turning them into something really spectacular.
In the end I learned something.... No, not really. It was hell week! We have 2 more videos to complete. I'm going to be prompting them for as much advanced information as possible to try to turn out much better stuff for the next two!
