Astropolitan Creates

Astropolitan director Steven Wagner recently completed a new music video for electronic duo DJ? Acucrack’s track, “So To Speak,” which was shot and finished at full resolution in the 24p HDTV format, a first for music videos. Incorporating live-action, 3D, motion-capture and miniatures, the music video for this club-hit track is a glimpse into the dark side of a future city. VFX supervisor Andrew Honacker noted, “Steven and I wanted to create a photo-surrealistic look to the piece, with a dollhouse-from-hell feeling.” They turned to artist Sean Culver and Blue Box Studios to build the environments required for the production. All models were photographed at high resolution and photo-mapped using Realviz’s Image Modeler software, which allowed the Astropolitan artists to match the live-action camerawork to the model environments in 3D. Another challenging aspect of the video was replacing an actress’ entire body with CGI. The video marked the first time live-action plates, bluescreen elements and motion-capture were recorded at the same time. The project was shot with Sony’s HDW-F900 by director of photography Damon Furberg. Character animation was achieved in Alias|Wavefront’s Maya by Sean Capone and environments were built in 3D Studio Max and Electric Image. All compositing was completed with Adobe After Effects by Andrew Honacker, Talon Nightshade and Jakub Hryniewicz. Produced by Wagner, “So To Speak” is a follow-up piece to his 2001 clip “e-LECTRICITY,” which debuted on the Sci-Fi Channel, screened at numerous festivals around the world and recently won a 2002 BDA award for Best Music Video. “So To Speak” can be seen on MTV’s 120 Minutes beginning in late summer. Hybrid production and post studio Astropolitan Pictures was founded by Steven Wagner and Andrew Honacker in 1997. Since the company’s launch, it has contributed to numerous film, commercial and broadcast design projects. For the past two years, the team has been focused on music video and short subject production.