Situation & Task

In the fall of 2023, AJR’s manager contacted me about creating some show visuals for their album release show in New York City. I had a 7 day deadline for this visual along with 3 others. The musicians requested that I create a boat on the ocean that resembles that of the movie “The Little Mermaid” from 1989.

Action

I used a Houdini script in Cinema 4D to create the waves out of planes. I textured the ship with very cartoon-like shaders and incorporated the AJR logo onto the sail. The difficult part about this animation was creating a foggy effect while still having the thunderstorm in the background really shine through. I created the HDRI in Unreal Engine and imported the image sequence to After Effects for compositing. Because I could not render out a foggy scene in Cinema 4D with an alpha channel, I had to get creative in how I would composite the scene together. I ended up rendering out two versions of the scene from Cinema 4D, one that was fully textured, and one that was a black and white matte. Then using track mattes in After Effects, I was able to composite the Unreal Engine and Cinema 4D renders together. I also grabbed some stock footage of a rain overlay and increased its intensity throughout the video in order to further emphasize the chaotic nature of the scene.

Result

The artist and management were pleased with the visual and went on to use it for the album release show and promotion of the song across social media platforms.