How this one-man VFX team built a 4-minute-long CGI cyberpunk music video

Creative director Dan French is an autodidact – when the resources at his disposal don’t cut the mustard, he gladly takes on the work of teaching himself. “I learn on the go and because I’m a bit of a tech geek at heart, I’m always playing with new tools.” The gulf from tinkering to mastering is wide, yet Dan has covered it in light speed, singlehandedly building a 4-minute music video for wrapper Jianbo’s single For The Honour (feat. Nix Northwest), entirely in VFX.

After university, Dan moved to London from his Beaconsfield home and worked up his way of the creative career ladder, starting as a runner before finding himself in the directors chair today. His dad is a creative director and informed his love for films, art and music growing up. As his directorial work began to flourish, so did his scope for VFX. The video for For The Honour all started with a simple idea. “Originally, I was going to approach this in a traditional live-action way, using VFX to enhance real footage,” shares Dan. But as the idea grew, Dan thought going digital would be exciting – and so the ambitious journey began. Dan was influenced by Blender artist Ian Hubert who is known on YouTube for his sci-fi dystopian realms. These dark cyperpunk worlds, paired with Dan’s gravitations towards PS2 and GTA aesthetics, Blade Runner 2049 and Wong Kar-Wai’s classic neon dreamscapes, created the ingredients for Dan’s VFX development and also took into consideration Jianbo’s Vietnamese and Chinese heritage.

The video opens with the camera meandering through fields of bright lights and skyscrapers before circling around Jianbo rendered in 3D statue form. Small details like raindrops beading off his figure add to Dan’s detailed world-building. Dan says: “There’s real thought behind each vignette and all of it relates in some way to his experience of different kinds of honour, whether sometimes that’s misplaced or not.” Dan’s work in bringing metaphors to stretch the track’s narrative into visuality is direct a result of the medium. Unlike film and TV, where dialogue fills in the gaps, Dan travelled deep into research into how best to bring out Jianbo’s story.

However, this wasn’t without its pitfalls, as Dan explains, “We didn’t have fancy mocap suits or technology, so we had to scan Jianbo and Nix with LIDAR on an iPhone.” You might be familiar with mocap suits from BTS footage of the Avatar films; suits that allow performers’ movements to be captured with precision. Dan, with limited resources, set these industry standard methods aside to work from scratch using tools already at his fingertips. He continues: “The data of Jianbo’s body first looked like he had these weirdly short T-Rex arms, and his face just didn’t translate.” Despite these initial obstacles, the final video fortunately has no dinosaur limbs in sight.

Dan’s favourite scene from the video features a fortune teller machine where Jianbo’s head spinning between lit signs of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. He chatted in depth with Jianbo on his experiences with things like honour, legacy, and success: “We spoke a lot about how these things manifested in his life, and what choosing the right path looks like, because he comes from a background where certain choices could’ve led down the wrong path,” Dan says. A testament to Dan’s world-building choices, he distilled these into optic form using these scene. “The fortune teller machine illustrates that variability, where potentially things could go wrong.” Although the video has been a success, Dan isn’t sure he’ll be jumping on the VFX train again anytime soon. “It was an amazing experience but I don’t know if I would do a whole four minutes of animation myself again, without a VFX team,” Dan ends. For now, as it stands, the For The Honour video is as a demonstration of Dan’s sheer creative dedication and grit.