French director Mobeg reached out to our team to handle all the post-production for the music video he directed for the artist Smarza, featuring Nelly Kia.
An alien entity controls and experiments on two humans (Smarza and Nelly) from a control room, where it observes their every move and analyzes their emotional responses. To create this universe as accurately as possible, the scenes of the entity and the dancers were filmed in a studio.
The director tasked us with making a simple edit with precise cuts, allowing the story to flow smoothly and be easily understood by viewers. The majority of our work focused on the VFX, as the requirements were extensive. We had to track multiple HUD screens and sync them with the entity’s movements to give the impression it was actually manipulating them with its hands. We also added flickering frontal LEDs on the artists to make it appear that they were truly under the entity’s control, along with VFX in their pupils to give them a robotic look.
Finally, we worked on the scenes with the dancers, which were meant to represent the emotions and thoughts of the two artists. We created a blurry, ghostly effect with long echoes around the dancers, almost as if they were in the middle of a dream. The last phase of the video involved the most special effects, as it depicts the moment when the two characters transform completely and connect, with energy emanating from them and electric arcs forming around them to symbolize their union.
