Situation & Task

While contracted through WastedPotential, I was part of a 3-person team tasked with implementing the VFX in Mario’s “Mars” music video. The video was meant to transform the living room scene to the planet of Mars.

Action

Due to the reflection of the green screen and limited tracking points, we faced many challenges in creating high quality effects. We ended up having to use a combination of key light and rotoscoping in order to isolate the performer. I was able to create nebulas and galaxies in Cinema 4D and then render them out as 8k still frames. By manually placing position keyframes in After Effects, I tracked the background to the scenes and pre-composed the layer so that I could apply a CC Lens effects in order to give the effect of a camera lens without having it move with the position keyframes. A displacement map linked to a fractal noise was also applied in order to give the background some movement.

Result

We were able to come up with a realistic result that both the artist and the team were happy with and the video went on to accumulate over 2,000,000 views on YouTube. The project caught the attention of Black Entertainment Television (BET) which ended up sponsoring an LED billboard in Times Square in order to promote the video.