KromA had to turn out some 500 composites a week for the CG-laden Britney Spears Toxic video. All Toxic images courtesy of KromA.

Relatively few vfx facilities specialize purely in music videos. Most supplement their income with commercials work, a more lucrative though arguably more rigid format. And though technology continues to be the great enabler, over the last few years there’s been something of a decline in the amount of music videos to feature vfx , at least to any substantive degree.

“Visual effects is still a relatively expensive endeavor. You face budget issues on any sort of job, but music videos have become a lot more intensive,” says Elad Offer, creative director at LA-based Money Shots Post, one of the few high-end facilities that specialize in music videos. “You’re expected to produce the same amount of work as three or four years ago, often for less budget, whereas the cost of creative hasn’t changed that much. We’ve had heavy effects video projects to do where the deadline has been just a day and a half. Those things are major hurdles.”

Money Shots recently completed a pair of music videos for OutKast, both number ones on Billboard: Hey Ya! and The Way You Move. On occasion record companies will cough up for something special, particularly if it’s for an artist at the top of its game. And that was the case, in particular, with Hey Ya!, which features Andre 3000 performing as all eight members of his own band.

Aladino Debert (left) and his Radium team won VES’ Outstanding Visual Effects in a Music Video for Missy Elliot’s Pass That Dutch. Missy takes a turn as King Kong in the video on the right. All Pass That Dutch images courtesy of Radium Inc.

The video was shot in two days, and Offer and his team had a week to complete the visual effects and deliver a finished product. “That meant eight different takes for every camera move, and in each take Andre 3000 was performing each actor. We had a lot of footage in which we had only one Andre 3000 perform the one track through one camera move. Our challenge was to put it together into one coherent thing.”

An important part of the challenge was figuring out how to realize the concept fast.