Max Cooper - With Me

'With Me' is a little trip around New Zealand with a spacetime bending alien. For the ‘Motif’ EP, I wanted to explore a range of typical club structures and genres with a bit of my own spice. Musically on “With Me” I went down a chord driven operatic garage experiment with Kathrin deBoer, with a theme of togetherness. I started chatting video ideas with Michael McAffee and we decided to present the themes visually as us spending time with some otherworldly entities, usually invisible, living alongside us, but now revealed. These aliens of sorts also don’t experience time and space as we do, so as we hang out with them, living from their perspective things start to get a bit weird. Michael had a trip planned to New Zealand so his travels formed the basis of the setting with some epic results. It was a fun project to work on - many thanks to Kathrin and Michael for working on it with me. Michael McAfee: Max and I wanted to explore the idea of entities that travelled between & altered space and time with this piece -- As the video progressed, the severity of the rift in space-time would magnify. It seemed appropriate for the visual style of the creatures I design and it allowed me to experiment with compositing my creatures into live action footage. To convey the idea of bending space and time visually, I found that capturing photogrammetry scans and HDRi images of the environment yielded very usable 3D geometry that I could manipulate in CG. Different parameters of the morphing environment are driven by audio stems of the track that Max provided, which made for some nice audio-visual moments. 3D debugging UI elements made their way into the glitch segments, which gave the feeling that these seemingly real scenes are actually the constraints of time & space that are breaking down. A good chunk of this was done in Unreal Engine thanks to the help of Vince McKelvie. Doing these segments in a video game engine allowed us to use custom-made shaders that generate feedback loops in realtime. Everything is filmed handheld on a phone, on location in New Zealand - I wanted it to feel as if the footage captured were isolated sighting of these creatures. You’ll notice that lots of lens flares, handheld shakes, and general visual artifacts are retained in the footage which I thinks help sell the compositing work as well as the ‘random creature encounter’ vibe.