Missy Elliot pays homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. As a result, Radium had to create this CG spaceship.

“For that one we had a week to do a lot of tracking, and removing and replacing heads. We did it like that because there were places where more than one dancer was interacting with each other and with her,” explains Yukich. “That was almost 100 shots and each shot had between two and eight head replacements. On average, four or five composites on each shot, so four or five hundred composites to do in a week. I stayed up for three or four days in a row, which meant a lot of Red Bull and Rockstar. You have to start cycling them out.”

Their next collaboration is on SoCal rockers Offspring, with a 120-camera rig shooting multiple angles in a dome, with each frame coming from a different camera — something neither director nor digital artist has tried before. “That’s the fun of it for me. To have a director come and say, ‘Can you make this happen?’ and it’s something that I’ve never done, or that hasn’t been done before and we have to come up with a solution to make it work.”

Big Boi becomes a Jedi in the OutKast video of The Way You Move. © 2003 Arista Records; courtesy of Money Shots.

Yukich relies mainly on SoftImage XSI for 3D rendering and Avid DS for compositing. The fact that the two programs work together and the tools translate back and forth, he says, makes the process more straightforward and reliable.

“I think the biggest change that happens with visual effects is the tools become faster and you can do more in less time,” he says. “Three or four years ago, doing a couple of little things was such a big deal, now it’s nothing. The computers get faster and the software gets better and you can do so much more. So we can do 50 shots instead of just one shot. As far as budgets, it’s all relative. You get more for your money.”

Radium’s Debert concurs: “The main trend [in music videos] is that you push yourself more and more. Budgets generally don’t change, but the quality of the work that you have at your fingertips is so much better and more out there than even a couple of years ago. It allows directors to come up with ideas that push the envelope. You can grow out from a creative standpoint to a crazy directions, because the technology has caught up so that you can do these things.”

Sam Molineaux is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist. Her writing on film, music and technology has appeared in Variety, Below The Line, BPM, Installation Europe and the New Times, among other publications. She is currently writing a pair of books for publisher McGraw-Hill on digital music on the Mac OSX, to be published later this year.