Brian Kubat » Video Production

Set Ablaze

admin — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:08:46 +0000

Tripped out effects and sick lyrics
I helped with some of the effects on a recent music video for Oaklyn Records artist Azeem. The video was directed by Erica Nelson and features music by Bay Area veterans Meat Beat Manifesto. Check it out!

Click here to watch the video.

Breakggs

admin — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:00:10 +0000

Psychedelic 3D music video
This video contains six and a half minutes of 3d animation and multimedia compositing. It all started when a friend Evan a.k.a. Tha Fruitbat asked Erica Nelson and I to make a music video for him, almost a year ago.

Click here to watch the video.

The video was created using LightWave, SpeedEdit, FinalCut Pro, Flash and Photoshop. Erica and I worked together to green-screen the chicken and pick out stills for the stop-motion animation. Erica was responsible for visuals generated entirely from waveforms of the audio using a flash template that resembles the oscilloscope in my mp3 player. She processed the waveform readouts with the suite of plugins available in FinalCut. Features like the kaleidoscope plugin that would normally be too experimental to use worked perfect with the style we were going for.

I was responsible for the background video, 3d animation, and final comp. The background video is comprised of Digital Juice animations I own. In order to stray from the generic nature these libraries have in their raw form, I reduced their opacity and keyed them in a process I call “quadding”. This basically consists of me flipping four versions of the video plate so they are symmetrical in all four corners. The whole music video is “quadded” with a few exceptions. The result is a complex image with a vortex in the center.

I composited Erica’s effects, the awesome chicken, and my animated 3d objects over the background. Objects often appear chameleon-like since the surfacing matches the background videos. Object morphing is controlled by the audio signal of Evan’s track using LightWave’s audio channel envelope modifier. There’s tessellations, dodecahedrons, and oodles of compositing.

Muir Woods

admin — Mon, 18 May 2009 01:05:19 +0000

Ancient coastal redwood forest
While living in SF, I had the opportunity to get some footage of Muir Woods, one of my favorite parks in the Bay Area. There’s mossy logs, streams, fern covered hillsides and giant redwood trees.

Click here to watch the video.

Entomology Experiments Pt1

admin — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:39:08 +0000

Insect analysis art
This is the first video in a series of experimental videos I will be putting online over time. I made the video by using a video microscope and collected insects. The microscope’s rack focus is used to get an interesting effect.

Click here to watch the video.

The image seen here is of the back of a moth, right below the thorax and between the wings. The form appears out of place, and after analysis of several websites and photos of moths, I can only assume it is some sort of parasite. (UPDATE: it’s not a parasite, it’s the thorax…) Hopefully more interesting finds like this will come up with further analysis of insects under the microscope!

Soundtrack:
Beytah – Mercurial Densification (Right click link to save mp3 version.)