Consider this your Canadian content for the day! Excellent video by Victoria, B.C.-based production duo Ft. Langley (OPD Brooks and William Wilkinson) for experimental folk band, Aidan Knight (whose lead singer songwriter/namesake also hails from Victoria).
We asked Wilkinson about the original vision for the video and where the team’s inspiration came from:
“We really wanted to make a low quality CG Aidan Knight do dumb things. It started as a writers room joke, but it made us laugh too hard to just let go of it.
I had seen this TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley that has a scene where young Steve Jobs is screaming in a pitch black room as a form of therapy. It’s apparently called Primal Therapy, and it was briefly popular in California in the 70s. It was a big inspiration.
We found CG modelling software that let us build characters (like The Sims) and as soon as our beautiful polygon Aidan was birthed we were in love. The software is called Mixamo and it has this hilarious catalog of character animations that’s mainly geared towards games developers. We only got to use a fraction of our favourites because they were too weird, like having the character mime using a wheelchair, or walking like a ogre.
We teamed up with our friend Justin Steele and he built our Tron desert for CG Aidan to lose his mind in, we love how it turned out.
Our goal with the animation was to make it look like a band had spent a lot of money in the early 80s to make a really impressive animated sequence that wasn’t worth it. We did everything we could to simulate the processes and quality degradation involved in 80s animation, with hand aligned layers wiggling slightly, flickering, and the softness of transferring from tape to celluloid.”
Watch “All Clear” below!
