Foo Fighters ‘No Son of Mine’
Bomper Studio directs an adrenaline-filled, animated music video for legendary rock band, Foo Fighters for the track ‘No Son of Mine’.
RCA approached Bomper Studio with live action footage of the band, filmed by director Danny Clinch for Jimmy Kimmel Live!, with the desire to use this footage as a base to release an epic music video in a tight-turnaround. The initial brief was to cut the live action footage with frames of CGI animation to tell a sketch-book style character story, reminiscent of the fast-paced, first-person perspective in ‘Smack My B*tch Up’ by Prodigy.
Taking cues from the song’s lyrics and theme, the music video follows a character through a night of wild debauchery and violence – from strip clubs to bar fights to high speed driving – before a full punchline reveal of the character’s true identity.
The film uses stark black and white visuals, punctuated with green and is filled with quick cuts, chaotic action and disorientating close-ups to deliver knockout punches. Nothing is overly smooth or slick, but the high contrast, explosive music video for ‘No Son of Mine’ works to serve up a shot of pure adrenaline straight to the heart.
Development
The production took place from late December 2020 - January 2021. Being huge fans of the hard-boiled storytelling and gritty aesthetics from comic book noir, such as the work of the iconic Frank Miller, Bomper worked to execute the music video in a similar fashion.
Director Emlyn Davies and co-director Josh Hicks worked to develop a visceral tale that was hard and fast, charting the spectrum of lust: blood, money, drugs and alcohol. This story was then borken up into a series of vignettes, to be intertwined with live action footage of the band.
Environment Building
The first point of call in the production was to create minimal, instantly readable environments. This stylistic approach not only worked well for the stark and constrasted aesthetic, but lended itself well to the deadline, as the asset creation did not require as much detail as a full-scale, elaborately teatured 3D production.
Character Development
For the characters, Bomper approached texture artist, Thomas Shaban, to create inky and contured, hand-painted textures with a limited palette. Against the environments, the linework justs the tracks into raw expressionsim; drawing you into the world of hard-hitting characters. Keeping in with the style, the film was built to the lower the frame rate of 12FP.
Live action
To keep the film feeling a cohesive whole, Bomper edited the live action footage and treated it; doing R&D to hand-paint frames from each shot and then running it through an EBSynth to match the grungy, stark, duotone output of the CG shots