A little bit of everything. I directed, co-produced, and handled the majority of the post work, including all editing and compositing.

John, my producing partner, and I were contacted by the team at Sony about turning in a treatment back in late February/early March. We turned in an initial treatment that was much darker. Sony came back several weeks later and said it was down to us and another director for the project.

We were asked to develop a new treatment that would be more upbeat and positive. They needed something immediately. We turned around this quirky half page treatment over coffee that morning. Two weeks later, we found out that we won the gig. From that point, we had another two weeks to get through preproduction. I quickly had to flesh out the animatic and, from there, get production locked down. It was stressful but a lot of fun.

In total, I had help from two other guys in post. Shawn Dorsey helped me with some 3D modeling and Kelly Myers helped with a little keying and a couple of 3D setups and rendering.

All-in-all, there were nine worlds, each with an average of three matte paintings and around 52 shots. 52 is not a lot for a music video but it was nice that the song had a slower pace to it which allowed me to hold onto shots a lot longer. Although, it meant that there was a lot more work per shot in some cases.

With any other package, I had would have choked under the weight and time. I had to wrap the video up inside of two months. It was tough. Fusion allowed me to power through shots and not have to wait endless seconds for a frame refresh or crash on me constantly under too much weight.

Fusion's particle system was invaluable and extremely flexible in the video. We also shot on RED and the ability to haul in that footage natively and then dial in a first look right inside Fusion was awesome. It works really well with Lightwave and imported 3D cameras and EXR files that were rendered out in exrTrader with all the lighting channels split up. I can keep going...

I first got a little training on Fusion a couple of years back but I never really got to put it to use.

Coming from After Effects though, I love it. It is very intuitive.

It was simple to pick up when I purchased it this year and, with some training help from cmiVFX, I was up and running.

I'm a bit of a junkie when it comes to learning software and I thought Fusion was extremely easy to pick up. The timeline was easy to understand coming from After Effects and the nodes are so much easier to use than some of the other compositing and 3D apps out there. It has a very intuitive UI and something you think might work a certain way usually does.

The song is actually a fairly dark and sad song when you break down the lyrics. With this treatment, we stayed away from those a bit more and focused on the struggle the artist has and the process one might work through creating a piece.

Our first concept was actually a little girl handing out balloons to these down trodden people in a post-apocalyptic/steampunk city. The label and band wanted something much more positive and upbeat. We came up with the idea of messing with two and three dimensional space. That formed into the idea of an artist who creates and releases his work into the public then truly watches something come to life. It begins to live and breathe on its own based on how it affects the people who see it. Those people are who bring it to life. They each have their very own unique reactions to what they would feel.

I pulled from some of my favorite artists and movies. Artists like the Dean Brothers, Dali, Escher, Flemish painters, and movies like The Lord of the Rings and The Neverending Story. In some ways, it is a tribute to a few of them.

There were a lot of challenges and that was what made this project so much fun. Everyone at the label and in the band was very supportive and only added to the motivation to see this through to the best it could be.

Time had to be the largest obstacle. We had a video from concept to completion done inside of three months with three people in post and I only had limited use of the other two due to limited funds. That's where using the right tools and workflow was really important.

Shooting on RED helped with easier and cleaner keying, tracking, and reframing. The tools, including Fusion, used in post were all friendly with each other. I could network render, etc. There was a lot that I payed attention to in preproduction to make sure post would be possible.

The band performance shots had to be the hardest. I had a different vision for them originally in the treatment and it just wasn't looking very cool when I was actually building them out. I came up with working them into the floating islands and it looked great.

They were typically long shots and they had all the particles flowing in them, which increased the complexity a lot. On top of that, they all needed 3D motion tracking. While that worked out very nicely most of the time, I had a few issues on a couple of shots. Fusion let me nail the particles, everyone really loves that look. But a life saver was using Fusion's trackers and a couple of expressions to save several of the bad tracks without having to go back to square one, which would have meant massive amounts of rerendering of 3D elements.

I think my favorite shot though is the elephant and horse scene.

You can't beat some of the keying tools in Fusion. I keyed out a scene in a movie we wrapped up. Over 60 shots across almost six minutes of two guys talking in a car, through a windshield, and it worked! I love the particle system. I'm really starting to work more and more with FBX objects and working with them right inside of Fusion. I also love how easy it is to make macros that are really powerful. That might be the most valuable tool for me.

I'm continuing to hustle. We have a couple of possible new music videos and we're also releasing a feature comedy we created called The General Specific. It's a pretty ridiculous movie that we made in an equally ridiculous way - so it was a lot of fun. We're also working on a web series concept that's pretty unique and it will be fun to see where that goes. It has some required VFX needs so that also gets me excited. The more I can play in the action/fantasy world, the more fun I always have.

Visit the Elevate website here.

Visit the official Red Music website here.

Here's a sneak peak at what's coming next for Jeremy and his team...here.