Santa Monica's Gorilla Post recently completed over 140 visual effects shots for Nickelback’s video “Feelin’ Way Too Damn Good“. The band now touring in Europe will release the video in the United States sometime in February.

The video’s uniquely abstract concept directed by Martin Weisz follows a stream of life-like luminous particles, which attract a curious audience to the band as they light up the night with their glow.

Gorilla Post teamed up with Jay Odom and Robert Dahlin of Gunslinger Digital to bring director Martin Weisz’s CGI particles to life. With a four-week deadline artists Michael Vaglienty and Steffen Schubert worked diligently in getting all of the particles composited in. The video involved a lot of work with quite a few challenges. The biggest challenge was to keep continuity with the particle movements. The particles had to be in the right places as they would if they were actually traveling. As the song became more intense so did the movement of the particles themselves. The speed had to really make sense with the placement. Another difficulty was the difference in backgrounds made the particles look different from shot to shot. Quite a bit of tweaking went into it in order to really keep the harmonious look. The video involved countless amounts roto-scoping, so many of the shots needed the particles to go behind the band members and travel around them as they curiously investigated their surroundings. The band members were shot in front of green screen and placed into the various shots.

Near the end of the video a dome of particles assisted in completing the look. Animating the swirling particles to have a look of their own was a bit of a challenge. In the end, the work completed and created a finale to the video. It didn’t happen on the first try, we went through a few animations before the last.

Gorilla composited lens flares adding an extra feeling to the video, really bringing out the luminance that Weisz wanted. We also added a ton of light effects in all of the CG particle shots. The light had to ignite the warm feeling, to express what the video represented.

The main compositing was done in Flame* and additional software used were After Effects and Combustion. The CGI particles were created using Maya.

Currently Gorilla Post is creating effects for Josh Kelley’s (Hollywood Records) new video “Everybody Wants You“ which will be featured on the soundtrack from the soon to release film “The Prince & Me“ starring Julia Stiles and Luke Mably.

Gorilla celebrates it’s first year this month and has worked on videos for JC Chasez, Crazytown, Fuel, Meat Loaf, Chemical Brothers, Busta Rhymes, Jaheim, Fabolous, and more. In addition to videos, Gorilla has created effects on commercials for Budweiser, Ford, and PS2.

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