fxphd post-grads make giant robot music vid

At fxphd, we love to showcase the work of our post-grads. fxphd “Special Ops” member Mikael Pettersén has just shared with us some incredible work he and some colleagues created for ‘Boss Wave’, a music video from UK electronic music artist Eryk Kowalczyk (aka ‘Xilent’).

The music vid features a giant robot in a video game world, with a fair bit of pixel paraphanlia thrown in. Pettersén, who contributed to the opening titles to fxphd’s Moving Day short, worked with Kristofer Ström and Erik Buchholtz on the robot video. Check it out below.

“We directed and created the concept together,” he tells fxphd. “Kristofer made all of the concept art, pixel graphics, blueprints and some comping. Erik did the modelling/rigging of the mech and the boss, all animations, the editing and all of the cockpit shots. I did the texturing, shading, rendering, ICE-stuff, dynamics, most of the comping plus modelled the smaller enemies.”

Some of the key tools used were Softimage, After Effects, Photoshop, Premiere, Mudbox, Maxwell Render, Zbrush, Mocha Pro, SynthEyes, Sketchbook Mobile, Sketchbook Pro and Fusion. In addition, the Exocortex Momentum and Optical Flares plugins were crucial to the project.

Congrats to the guys for pulling off this excellent work.

Check out the gallery below of behind the scenes images from ‘Boss Wave’.