Bringing this video to life was quite an undertaking. For those who are interested, some details about the making.
Creating the Demon Music Video
The video’s story roughly follows the lyrics of our track “Demon”, which already sketches much of the narrative. The script expands on the lyrics, filling in the gaps.
The story was broken into 36 illustrated pages. Starting with rough pencil sketches, leaving spaces for animations. The pencil drawings were then inked using calligraphy brush pens (SB53/SB56) and Micron fineliners on standard A4 printer paper.
These black-and-white illustrations were scanned, cleaned, and coloured in Clip Studio Paint, then exported with transparent areas to allow integration of the animated footage.
During a rehearsal, we recorded some videos from us playing instruments and singing with webcams and our phones. These recordings were stylized in Davinci Resolve to match the hand-drawn stills, then placed behind the transparent areas of the pages. A subtle dot-raster effect and paper texture added a vintage comic book feel.
Each of the 36 rendered and moving pages were imported in a Davinci Resolve Fusion 3D scene.
An animated page curl was added for a realistic page turn and a rotation along the paper side fore each page. Some coloured lighting sources create depth and shadow. The scene was captured using multiple moving cameras for a dynamic look.
Speech bubbles were created in Clip Studio Paint, since Davinci Resolve didn’t support that kind of shapes.
Adding a rotating logo that doesn’t show in reverse, some film grain and color grading, so all footage would blend in took more time then expected.
The music was recorded as a multitrack session by Duyvel in our rehearsal room. Then edited, mixed and mastered in Cubase.
Syncing all the lyrics, visuals, and captions turned out to be one of the trickiest parts, but ultimately we brought everything together, as you can see in the result.
