Assimilate’s Live FX Helped Produce ULB’s New Boom Boom Music Video
By Lou Wallace
VALE! ULB is is an emerging band making waves in the music scene with their innovative and eclectic sound. They have carved out a niche for themselves by blending various musical genres, resulting in a distinctive and dynamic style. You can find out more about them at https://valeulb.com/home .
Musical Style and Influences
Vale!’s music seamlessly integrates elements from rock, indie, electronic, and pop, creating a unique and engaging soundscape. This genre-blending approach allows them to appeal to a broad audience and keeps their music fresh and exciting.
The band’s influences are diverse, drawing inspiration from classic rock bands, modern indie groups, and contemporary electronic artists. This mix of influences contributes to their versatile sound and innovative musical arrangements.
The Band Members Are:
Vale! has released a number of singles and EPs that showcase their evolving sound. Each release highlights their musical growth and experimentation with different styles. Their discography is a testament to their versatility and commitment to pushing the boundaries of their music.
Their lyrics often explore themes of personal growth, resilience, relationships, and the complexities of modern life. These themes resonate with listeners and add depth to their music.
They have just released a new music video Boom Boom (see below) which utilized Assimilates Live FX for the visual FX’s. We spoke to the Producer & Colorist that made the video just jump out and matched the energy of the artists themselves.
The Production Team
Leandro Marini
FEATHER & CAP
Leandro Marini is a renown VFX Supervisor, Colorist and Post Production Producer based in Los Angeles. Over the course of 15 years in post production, Leandro founded and grew the post production companies LOCAL HERO and IMPERIAL CREATIVE and supervised the workflows, dailies, VFX, color and delivery of over 200 feature films and episodics. Leandro served as the colorist for most of these projects as well.
Leandro also is very active in the development of the ASSIMILATE SCRATCH finishing platform, having acted as an evangelist and consultant for ASSIMILATE for over 10 years. Leandro has presented at NAB, IBC and on various virtual events as a power-use of SCRATCH.
In 2015, Leandro also began a producing career. I REMEMBER YOU and MAXIMA are the first two features Leandro has completed as lead producer, the later has won over 25 Audience Awards including at HOT DOCS 2019.
ALEXANDER MACLEAN
Executive Creative Director
Alex is a lifetime Skateboarder, Coffee Aficionado, and award-winning filmmaker. He has worked as a Colourist, Editor, VFX Artist, and Director on Commercials, Music Videos, and Feature Films over the past decade.
Although based in New York City; Alex’s passion for filmmaking, photography, and traveling has awarded him a global client base of Advertising Agencies, Technology Companies & Fortune 100 Brands. His work has been seen everywhere from Sundance to the Super Bowl.
Q&A With Leandro Marini
Why did you decide to create the video this way?
This video has to launch a relatively new band, Vale! ULB. Their music is very high energy and pure fun. We needed something visually “loud” to really catch your eye and grab your attention. We came up with the idea of a concert stage on a Miami rooftop at night that had huge neon tubes playing the waveform of their music behind them. That would produce alot of “energy per frame” which we needed. And building that in the real world would have been so expensive and possibly not safe, that we moved it to a volume stage solution right away. With a little set extension in post, we got exactly what we wanted.
Describe how you used Assimilate Live FX?
Live FX was the central brain of the whole shoot, it would not have been possible without it. We used Live FX to not only drive the LED volume, but everything was composited LIVE, in realtime, from 6 premade animated layers. We prepped some assets and animations and then brought them into Live FX, composited, color graded, and polished them all live to camera. Live FX also drive our Quasar IBL Lights ( which needed to be in sync with the animated backgrounds ) and even served as the audio playback system at the same time, for the band. That’s a lot to ask of one system! Live FX never dropped a frame the whole day. We ran it off of a relatively simple, single RTX3090 windows system with a blackmagic sdi out card.
Why was it the best choice?
I’m familiar with the Live FX toolset and so we used every corner of it on this. On this project, sound sync, IBL and complex compositing, paint outs, realtime plugins, and especially color grading ( the neon really had to be dialed carefully so as to be very colorful but not blow out the camera’s sensor ) all had to work together and I’m not aware of another system that can do that all in one system. Plus, it runs on hardware we allready own. We literally just re-purposed one of our existing mid-level VFX systems that normally runs After Effects and Cinema4D.
Describe how it allowed you to do more in the virtual environment?
The cost and safety issues shooting that scene in the real world would have caused would have been a no go. I don’t think this could have been done in any other way. Plus it’s all set at night, and we got to shoot during the day as a perk, with the comfort of a sound stage. As complex as this was, there were no hiccups and we actually wrapped a half hour early.
Was it easy to use?
Live FX can be used in 2 ways : just the basics or as a deep power user. I would say that you can run a basic volume production from Live FX pretty easily. But I would encourage VP supervisors to dig deeper. Yes, there is a learning curve to unlocking the more advanced, somewhat magical abilities of Live FX ( as there is with any compositor ), but the reward is huge. Live FX is a 3D realtime compositing system that can key, grade, load unreal or notch 3D backgrounds, take in 3D camera tracking and record that, is an industry leading Image-based-Lighting platform, and can even make your dailies if you want it to. Unlocking all those features takes some dedication but I have found it worth it and it’s given my company a major competitive advantage.
Here are some example images of using Live FX for the main set extend :
BEFORE
AFTER
Here are some general grabs right out of camera with our beautiful LED BG :
Here’s a point I’d like to make about how using a volume stage for pure greenscreen inserts is a great idea because you can get a perfect keying greenscreen instantly ( no seams, variation in lighting on the greenscreen, etc… ) :
And here are the examples of a last minute change we had to make because one of the band members’ wife (Friki) was giving birth the following day and we had to get him out early. When we learned that the artist known as Friki wouldn’t be available for the second half of the day, and not at all for the rest of the days, where we were shooting scenes that he definitely was in, we came up with a clever, quick solution : we put up some reference backgrounds just for environment lighting and used Live FX to make a small green box right around him so we could get clean elements that lined up perspective-wise and lighting wise :
PLATE
FINAL SHOT
In the “storyline” part of the music video, every time FRIKI is seen, it’s a composite, he wasn’t there on the day. We could not have done this project without Live FX and even with these curveballs, we wrapped early both shoot days.
Additional Production Images
And here Is The ULB Boom Boom Music Video!
About Live FX
Live FX is a media server in a box. It can play back 2D and 2.5D content at any resolution or frame rate to any sized LED wall from a single machine. It supports camera tracking, projection mapping, image-based lighting and much more.
Native implementation of Notch Blocks and the USD file format allow to use Live FX with 3D environments as well – but it doesn’t stop there! Through Live Link connection and GPU texture sharing, Live FX can also be combined with Unreal Engine and Unity.
Live FX’s extensive grading and compositing features enable users to quickly implement DoP feedback in real time and even allow for set extensions beyond the physical LED wall.
In a nutshell – what does it do?
- Projection Mapping for LED wall stages
- Image-based Lighting (IBL) via pixel-mapping
- Virtual Set Extensions
- Camera tracking: Mo-Sys, NCAM, Intel, HTC & more
- Volume Grading
- Green / blue screen keying & garbage masking
- Live Compositing with 2D and 3D Environments
- Support for 3D Notch Blocks and USD (Universal Scene Descriptor)
- LED wall control
- DMX lighting control based on LED wall image content
- Recording of video & metadata
- Metadata & Comp prep for VFX post
- Live Link to Unreal Engine and Unity
- SDI/NDI capture & output
- Direct GPU texture sharing with other apps
Live FX
Price and Availability
Starting at $345.00 (USD), Assimilate Live FX 9.7 is available immediately for purchase and download at www.assimilateinc.com.
About Assimilate
As the leading provider of cutting-edge post-production software and tools, Assimilate® develops and offers advanced, real-time tools for on-set and post-production workflows that deliver groundbreaking features, speed, performance, flexibility, and stability for industry professionals. The recently launched Live FX Studio is a state-of-the-art live compositor, shipping with projection mapping, camera tracking, DMX control for image-based lighting and the latest green-screen keying technology for virtual production. Live Assist is the multi-cam VTR tool for video assist, offering support for any number of cameras, any resolution, with easy green-screen comp and local-clip server functionality. Live Looks is the optimum tool for live grading and direct-look creation with an instant connection to Assimilate’s Scratch software for live streaming and keying capabilities. Used by DITs and post artists worldwide, Scratch VR is known for its advanced on-set and post-production tools that offer stability, speed and metadata support for any camera format, including 2D/3D/VR. Play Pro Studio is the go-to solution for a professional player for VFX-reviews, ProRes RAW QC and genuine ProRes transcoding on Windows. Learn more at www.assimilateinc.com. Learn more at www.assimilateinc.com.