“For the technical part it was a question of whether to use green screen for the different passes, or rotoscoping. We went with rotoscoping because we had to shoot a lot in a very short timespan: four different camera moves, each with eight different performers, which meant 32 passes. If we had gone with greenscreen, setting up for each one of these passes would have taken forever. The only way to get it done in time was to shoot the whole stage as it was for every pass and then hand-roto the different passes together.”

The plates were shot with a Milo motion control camera; then back at the lab each was rotoscoped to separate the different performers that Andre 3000 was acting, and then re-assembled to create the effect of a group of identical performers. A process Offer describes as relatively straightforward, with only a few minor problems like inconsistent focus or lighting that had to be corrected in post. “By far the biggest issue was time constraints. We finished Hey Ya! in about a week, with eight people working around the clock,” he adds.

Has he been surprised at the amount of attention the video has been getting?

Andre 3000 played eight different roles in the OutKast video of Hey Ya! Money Shots had only a week to rotoscope the piece. © 2003 Arista Records; Courtesy of Money Shots.

“Not really, because Hey Ya! has such a wide appeal as a song. At the end of the day, no matter how good the video is, it’s about how successful the song is. Everything came together, and Andre 3000 is a really good performer and came fully prepared for shooting that video. All those factors come together.”

For Missy Elliott’s hit single, Pass That Dutch, digital effects facility Radium completed as many as 210 visual effects shots for the 4:31 video. The highly distinctive piece features a variety of contrasting scenes such as Missy as King Kong hanging off the top of buildings, line dancers in a swishing CG wheat field, a dancing Hummer vehicle, a hovering spaceship and plenty more, as the song moves through its different musical styles.

“It’s somewhat unusual for a music video to have that many effects shots,” says Radium’s head of CG Aladino Debert. “It just kept growing and growing. For example, for the King Kong section at the end what was originally going to be four shots ended up being 58.”

Though the video pushed the use of vfx way beyond most of what you see on MTV — and Radium won top honors for it at last week’s second annual VES Awards — it wasn’t that they did anything they hadn’t done before, says Debert, more that it was done on such a massive scale and in such a short time.

A lot of the designs and overall look were created on the fly with no time for concept drawings or to run each and every idea by director Dave Meyers. “We had compositors working nightshifts, checking renders from home all the time. We had all these other things going on at the same time. It was crazy. I think we completed it in 10 or 11 days. It was just a huge logistical nightmare, but I’m very glad we did it.”

Often what began as a simple idea grew beyond all expectation as the artists and director let their imaginations roam free.

“The dancing on the corn crop circle sequence started simple and ended up being full digital matte paintings for all the background,” Debert remembers. “Then the director said it would be cool to have a spacecraft, like a reference to Close Encounters. So we made a spaceship! The CG heavy stuff were the crows, which I personally sat down and animated. We shot some crows on green screen landing on a little green piece of wood; and we had a trainer with a green glove. All the medium to far-away shots were CG. On those shots there’s nothing real but the humans. They were shot on the green screen and then beyond a thin layer of corn in front, everything else was matte paintings or CG. Then we had a massive amount of compositing. Every single shot was touched in some way. We had three different Inferno artists working non stop: Jonathan Keeton, Andy McKenna and Scott Rader.”