LOS ANGELES — Ingenuity Studios (www.ingenuitystudios.com) recently completed work on the latest music video for Imagine Dragons. Sharks is a fully-animated, Saul Bass-inspired video, and marks the studio's fifth collaboration with the band, having also worked on their
Natural,
Bad Liar,
Follow You and
Cutthroat videos.
Ingenuity Studios’ motion design department worked from concept to final delivery, taking inspiration from iconic graphic designer Saul Bass. The team developed a cast of shark characters and stylized band members in order to bring the story of the song to life. As the story unfolds in 2D, the song’s lyrics appear as stylized typography, filling out the frame and helping scenes transition from verse to chorus.
The creative team primarily worked with Adobe’s After Effects & Illustrator, as well as Blender. The typeface - called “Hitchcock” - was created by Matt Terich and made available on typographica.org. Character rigs were a combination of Duik Bassel and Limber, and the artwork was imported from Illustrator using Overlord.
“Interscope has had a great track history working with Ingenuity Studios across both animation and VFX for many of our projects, and I’m very glad we have been able to collaborate over the years on some great animated videos for Imagine Dragons,” says Jared Shelton, director of creative content, Interscope Records. “This has culminated on the latest animated video for Sharks, which feels like a perfect accompaniment to our song and creative campaign, and we couldn’t be happier! This homage to Saul Bass’ art style has been something I’ve wanted to do for a while and fits so perfectly with the song and creative.”
“The Sharks brief was completely open-ended, and the winning pitch was just one of four or five phenomenal pitch ideas that the team came up with,” adds Alex Popkin, director of motion graphics & animation at Ingenuity Studios. “Since every member of our team has a Swiss Army knife skill set, we are accustomed to solving a wide variety of motion/VFX problems with all the tools at our disposal. We bring a boutique mentality to our projects – everything is made by hand, by artists and animation lovers who put a lot of thought and care into what they are making, and the result shows.”
The Ingenuity team included VFX supervisor/founding partner David Lebensfeld, VFX supervisor/partner Grant Miller, senior animator Bailee DesRocher and character designer Claudia Dillard. Christian Klein, Aiman Samat, Aubie Udochi, Simon Edl and Nick Canton all worked as animators on the project, with Edl also providing sound design. Cheryl Lee was 3D animator and Doni Petersen served as production coordinator.