SANTA MONICA, CA — The VFX team at Timber (http://timber.net) helped create a vintage, grungy aesthetic for Royce da 5’9”’s new music video Caterpillar, which features both Eminem and King Green. The lyric-driven piece pays homage to old-school music videos, juxtaposing the artists over text and visuals that further amplify the track’s rappid-fire lyrics.
Trigger & Bloom produced the video, with James Larese directing. The video features a limited color palette - just black, white and red - and uses film scratch effects and hand-written type fonts to further add to its grittiness.
Sunset Edit’s Cami Starkman cut the project, with Anthony Miralles assisting. It runs just under five minutes in length.
According to Timber creative director/partner Kevin Lau, the video was edited with Adobe Premiere and the timeline was exported to After Effects.
“Our artist took the base conform and repositioned the talent, posterized time, and colored the film,” he explains. “We then used a combination of tools, from After Effects to Photoshop to traditional ink & paper, to create the compositions and animations that were applied on top. Finally, we were then able to round trip our renders back to Premiere, where final adjustments and timing tweaks were made. The pipeline was built around Adobe software and Apple Macintosh computers.”
In addition to Lau, the Timber team included creative director/partner Jonah Hall; EP Sabrina Elizondo; senior art director Jon Lorenz; design/animation artists Ashley Becerra, John Robson and Liam Ward; Flame assistants Brandon Harden and Brack Hightchew; and producer Jillian Lynes.