Cable: "In The End" Music Video Design

Here's the music video for Cable's "In The End," which I did the art design and animation for.

Directed by the endlessly-visionary Daniel Algarin, the video is a love letter to Street Fighter, complete with looping sprite animations and bright, 32-bit colors.  Dan came to me with the idea after finding some gorgeous artwork online of old school videogame style backgrounds which had loops of movement in them. (More here)

Dan had me design our own to use as backdrops, these set in NYC, the band's base of operations, in locations that many New Yorkers would hopefully recognize.  We gathered tons of photo reference, which I used various elements from while creating the four backgrounds of the music video.

To create the looping people in the backgrounds, Dan shot the band and a handful of their friends (including their music producer, Blood Orange's Dev Hynes) against a green screen, which I took snippets from and created short loops to match the beat of the music.

The final composite backgrounds are:

A subway station on 42nd St.

A street in Brooklyn overlooking the Manhattan Bridge

The flight deck of the USS Intrepid, a former aircraft carrier turned museum on the west side

The Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden in Brooklyn

These backgrounds were then given in multiple layers to the video's editor/compositor Nicholas Lipari, who comped them together with the green screen footage of the band performing and added the pixelization to give it the 32-bit look.

Some easter eggs to try and spot are a graffiti tank stencil (a reference to the band's production company, TANK), the band's logo and the letters I-TE (In The End) painted on the neon pink jet, "Daniel Algarin" in an almost unreadable graffiti tag on the back wall of the subway station, and an ad for this very blog, 4st Place, on the roof of a taxi.

Made using:

Adobe Photoshop CS6, CC

Adobe AfterEffects CS6, CC

Intricate guitar solo!