Videos no longer dominate cable TV the way they did in the 1980s, of course, but like the actual music before them, videos have found a new life and a new young audience by going online.

For filmmakers and vfx artists, this means the opportunities videos created to experiment continues.

Radically different vfx techniques are on display in the videos to Bjork's 3D puppet-CG extravaganza Wanderlust, The Acorn's song The Flood, Part 1 and Wyclef Jean's Fast Car.

Wanderlust, which features a raging river in a dream-like world with herds of yaks and a river god, took more than six months to complete. All Wanderlust images courtesy of UVPhactory and Encyclopedia Pictura.

Wanderlust
In the acclaimed 3-D Wanderlust, the innovative Icelandic singer takes to a raging river in a dream-like world featuring herds of yaks and a river god that was an unexpectedly difficult challenge for New York-based UVPhactory.

Damijan Saccio, principal and co-founder of the vfx house, says Wanderlust was a challenge on every level and took six-and-a half months of post-production to complete. "It was a pretty big production for us, especially given that the budget only allowed for about two weeks," he says.

The river concept directors Isaiah Saxon and Sean Hellfritsch of Encyclopedia Pictura presented to UVPhactory was one of stylized blue threads that swell and flow.

"We always wanted to have the idea of individual strands of water, almost like pieces of yarn, especially after hearing about how they were going to be making the yak with all these pieces of wool," offers Saccio. "We wanted it to move realistically but be totally something that wasn't from this universe because this whole thing is like this mushroom-influenced kind of dream thing."

After some initial tests, Saccio says hair simulations yielded the most interesting results. But implementing that solution proved to be the most difficult part of an already-difficult and complicated project.

"Hair is never really meant to be used in that way," adds Saccio. "There's all sorts of limitations to the hair module in SOFTIMAGE|XSI that you've never come across if you were actually doing hair."

Creating infinitely long strands of hair that had none of the built-in limitations that control how hair acts at the root or end of a strand required lots of workarounds and the assistance of the engineers and coders at ImageSoft to create custom solutions to the problem.