Odonis Odonis recently shared their new video for "Come Alive." The track is off the band's self-titled album, which arrives November 15th via Royal Mountain.
In the video a digital character breaks out of a simulated world into a living, dynamic environment. The imagery draws on the Metabolists and visionary architects from Yona Friedman to Archigram.
Shawn Chiki (
https://shawnchiki.xyz/) directed and animated the project, noting that the band reached out just as his was making a big life move from Toronto to Los Angeles - adding to the challenge.
"It was also a coincidence that I’m at the crossroads as I go from being a sculptor/buildings nerd and starting a masters program in LA specifically for 'Fictional Architecture' - architecture for films, videogames, immersive media," notes Chiki. "It was a coincidence that the story of the video itself grew into a sort of architectural history project."
Years ago, while studying in Tokyo, Chiki learned about the Metabolists - radical post-WWII architects that saw the city as a growing and evolving organism in itself, capable of evolving, with a big emphasis on modularity and flexibility.
"The initial prompt the band gave about the song was 'someone waking up from the simulation,' and it progressed into a character, more or less, realizing that they were actually a city, a form of life in itself."
Chiki first sculpted the scenes in VR, blocked everything out, including the framing, composition, camera movement, etc.
"VR is actually perfect for that," he states. "You can build the world pretty quickly and get really up close and personal with the spaces."
Next, he programmed parametric models using architecture software to make flexible versions of the reference buildings, like the Nakagin capsule towers, the plug-in city, the marine city and the clusters in the sky. The last step was the red figure.
"It was trial and error, but the thing that worked the best was literally acting out the movements using a DIY motion-capture method," he shares. "If you watch the video twice, it might be fun to imagine every pose as me, sweaty in my apartment in the LA heat, doing all these dance moves and grand movements."