Behind the Scenes with Director Drew Russ

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August Burns Red "Identity"

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For August Burns Red’s Video for “Identity” I set quite an ambitious plan. The video would be a mixed media collage piece that set the band in a cartoon-like shipwrecked scenario. Here is the full video for reference:

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The entire video was put together using Adobe After Effects, but I was adamant on all of the textures come from hand drawn watercolors.

The basic workflow was to instruct the main illustrator the scenes to draw, print them out to scale, use a rigged light box to paint water color textures that would fit the shapes, then scan everything back in and clean it up in Photoshop.

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Lots of Paper

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Homemade light box

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Textures

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Backgrounds

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I worked with several artists and animators to create the whole video, but for this part, I will focus on the guitar solo (I could write pages about this video). I loved the surf-rock inspiration of the guitar solo, so I wanted to make the solo really special.

This workflow was slightly different. I took the isolated images of the guitar player from the green screen, added a threshold filter to make it monochrome, and then printed each (numbered) frame of the sequence onto watercolor paper to be modified. I chose ink-jet printer ink since it would dissolve and flow with the watercolor.

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Then, I handed off the papers (around 600 frames) to my friend Brian to paint, scribble, and scratch on the images of the guitar player. After he was done with those modifications, I scanned each image back into Photoshop, cleaned up the edged, stabilized the frames, and then inserted the guitar player into the scene in After Effects.

The following photos were taken on 35mm Fuji film

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JD Drawing waves

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Brian Selfie

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Bonus Izzy

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I love how this video came out (and it was nominated for Alternative Press’s video of the year), but in hindsight took a bit too long, took up most my kitchen and dining room, I got no sleep, and it drove me crazy trying to make. Was it worth it? I guess that’s up to you.

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