Austin

The music video Petrick created for singer Zemfira tells the story of Austin, the butler from the Hopescapes game, who has a nightmare. Petrick decided to bring Austin to life in the CG world and show his true feelings and emotions. Petrick believed that such realism would work really well, allowing the audience to connect with Austin like never before.

Awards:

• Berlin Music Video Awards
• LACA Film Festival
• Los Angeles Animation Festival
• Unknown Film Festival
• 2.2 M views and 7000+ comments on Youtube

Storyboard

Petrick started by developing the storyboard and boardomatic with director Lesha Krupnik. As they worked on the storytelling, they realized that a linear narrative would work best in this case. It gave them the freedom to address all the problems that Austin faced in the game.

Concept Art

To ensure Petrick chose the right path, they created concepts for a fully CG character. Petrick believed this would work well, as no one had ever seen Austin and his troubles in such close proximity before. Petrick decided to create the whole video in real-3D, mostly for the sake of visual consistency.

Character Design

The video features characters of varying levels of elaboration. Petrick spent most of their time working on Austin and Catherine, recreating them from scratch and rigging them. The video also includes Austin’s parents, portrayed as statues, the crowd at the auction, and the buyer. Petrick spent a lot of time working on the main character, Austin, as he was used to figure out and master the styles of all other characters.

For a scene where Austin meets his doppelgänger — one of the main storytelling clashes – we created two versions of the character: the usual and the old one. Petrick kept Austin’s original look and recreated his original clothes in every detail, even down to the buttons. They also created different versions of Austin’s look with varying amounts of dirt on his clothes to capture the events of the video.

Kathrine’s character was based on photos of actresses, and it took Petrick a while to figure out how to add just the right amount of spice to her. Visualization, rigging, hair simulation, and melting of Kathrine were created by the team at ZHEESHEE.

Kathrine’s dress idea was developed from scratch to highlight the eroticism of the scene, with the green color being the only element kept from her original look. Creating Austin’s parents was another challenge Petrick faced. They were striving to achieve a balance between making them look real and keeping them close to the original version from the game.

Petrick created statues and sculptures that look like his parents, as well as picturesque portraits of family members with luxurious framing. This way, the image of his parents follows Austin throughout the whole video.

The House

Austin’s family mansion is his most valuable possession. Inspired by the Victorian era and the original house from the game, Petrick created the mansion from scratch. The video features three versions of the mansion: the original, the burnt-down, and the model at the auction.

Animation and Simulation

This stage was one of the most time-consuming. Every scene in the video includes simulations of clothes, liquids, fire, and destruction of the floor and walls. Petrick went through a long process of iterations with every simulation to achieve the desired level of realism. Since Austin interacts with these simulations in almost every scene, character animation became more complicated.

Lighting and Camera

Petrick aimed to immerse the audience in the character’s emotional state by using a dominant color in each scene. Thanks to their camera director, Andrey Nikolaev, they were able to direct the light and move the camera as if it were a real-life set.