NETFLIX | JALO! - Rebel Moon
VFX | 3D | Compositing
Team - Jory Federighi, Brian LeGoo, Erik Fashingbauer, Christopher Watson-Wood, Amanda Jones, Brendan Henry, Santosh Dash & Debasish Sahu
"JALO!" is the official single from 'Songs of the Rebellion', an EP inspired by Netflix's Rebel Moon franchise. We were invited to collaborate with our pals at Mad Ruffian to tackle the VFX on this one. Spruce's focus was replacing a practical drone in the original footage with a more in-world cg counterpart.
We were provided a 3d model, and brought it into the Rebel Moon universe by dirtying it up, adding custom decals, lights, and additional inner mechanical pieces.
Time was of the essence on this project, so to streamline the animation process we created a simple rig with a small library of animations that were quick to slot in depending on the context of each shot. Our goal was to portray more dynamic flight movements as our little buddy zipped around trying to eradicate rebel scum he he
Here's one of our favorite new tools in action, Embergen. Thanks to Embergen, we were able to design this simulation in real-time, tweaking everything from the shape, collisions, fuel type and speed to capture a firework-like explosion that stylistically connected to the practical pyro used on set. Under the time constraints on this project, creating a custom asset like this wouldn't have even been considered through the traditional simulation process! (We've always wanted to do one of these "orbiting-a-frozen-sim" breakdowns lol)
The cinematography was action-packed, here are some stills from the music video with our little buddy.
Given the stylized camera moves and zooms in the footage, our priority was to maintain the integrity of the original footage while aligning the cg drone with the practical drone's flight pattern. To achieve that, we did some match-moves and 3d camera tracking for the cg drone to follow.
Below are some wireframe renders showcasing the match move and 3D camera track.
Check out the full music video below!