Kill The Noise - Album Trailer

Freelance Project 3D Motion

Journey through worlds while experiencing the sonic landscape created by Kill the Noise for his latest album "EMBRACE".

The album trailer is a mashup of all the album's tracks. To represent the vastly different personalities of them I created 7 environments that reflect the equally diverse intensity and personalities of the tracks on the album. We focussed on camera movement, a few key animated elements and environment design.

The project was brought to me by the incredibly talented Victor Scorrano, who also directed video and created the portal assets for this release. It was a absolute pleasure to work together on this project.

Spaceland

As the camera explores the structure, I wanted it to feel as if it was something that could be made by or even excreeted by an alien being. I focussed on creating an organic, iridencent, but also metallic material that was able to reflect the stars and lights I placed around the scene.

Jungle

As the first scene I tackled, this was one of the most challenging to create. I really wanted to reimagine a landscape that was both recognisable as a jungle but totally alien at the same time: familiar but foreign.

So I custom modelled different alien flora —chunky grasses, goopy lilipad-shroom hybrids, grapey bulb-stalks— and combined them with everyday plants that feature unnatural additions or colours (for example, willows with glowing strands and crimson lemon trees).

Ocean

This scene is the journey of submersion and resurfacing. Vastness was created with waves and horizon, using a huge expanse of water to help the music feel epic. The camera’s struggle to clear the ocean’s surface is designed to give the feeling of an uphill battle— a fight to get to the portal (and into the next portion of the album).

Mutation

In this scene we plunge into the guts of hell while being beaten by an onslaught of intense light and disorientating camera motion.

The construction of this scene was all about fleshy forms, moist textures and rancid colours. I repurposed 3D scans of seaweed as arteries, created glowing pustules and made the walls the meatiest texture I could. All this was topped off with an unhealthy amount of blinding glare, red mist and erratic motion (sickness inducing) blur.

Heaven

Breaking through the dark tunnels of the previous scene, we emerge into a world of clouds, euphoria and an almost sickening dizziness.

This was actually one of the quickest scenes to produce. Chucking a load of VDB clouds (pre-made clouds) into a scene is an easy way to get things looking heavenly, fast. The challenge here was the lighting: I wanted to give the clouds dramatic effect, so as well as adding sunlight, I layered in additional lights to highlight the cloud edges and create darker shadows.

Acid Hell

Violently plunging into a crevice down to the hostile world below, we are flanked by obsidian rock and piercing acid crystals that threaten to end our journey before the next portal.

To drive the feeling needed for this scene I contrasted acidic details with jet black rocks. I added green amoebas and crystals of various sizes to sell the malevolence, as well as a scattering of purple lights to balance out the green in the environment.

Wormhole

Nearing the end of our journey through the album, we are sucked into a wormhole as we are uncontrollably accelerated towards light speed. While an environment of stars, disorienting camera movement and warping space-time breaks our reality.

To achieve the sense of speed in this scene, I animated an increasing motion blur, decreasing camera focal length and created ever narrowing tunnels that warped with the music.

Ed Hendry