FX supervisor, 3D, compositor and editor Michos helped bring the Basement Jaxx sampled track to its most bounciness – the video ends up recalling digital artist Cyriak’s gifs (internet weirdcore classics), the looping energy of Instagram ‘boomerangs’ and the style of the Sugarbabes’ music videos, with a cameo from the noughties most iconic presenter, Davina McCall. Michos created scenes within Blender, such as escalators made out of piano keys; “I tried my best to make it look like the keys actually matched the song’s melody,” says Michos. Real streets were shot by photographers then fed back to Michos and the animation team, who would cut up the photographic elements and animate them individually, giving Pink’s map a constant sense of aliveness.
The whole process was communicated over Discord – “Other studios in the industry might use apps like Slack for communication and sharing assets, but for us it’s just easier to use Discord, since we’re still gamers at heart,” says Michos. “As we approached the deadline, it got more chaotic. We’d all stay in the voice channels at any hour to motivate each other, trying to survive on ‘micro-sleeps.’ We were basically a group of friends trying to complete very difficult tasks against a time limit.”
Pink’s musical world becomes more and more refined over each video, but here, it’s at its most fun – a world governed, powered by music, constantly moving, devilishly mismatched (London bus stops appear next to red American fire hydrants). Working with animator galxzys, the moving street scene (which makes you slow down the video just to see all of its moving parts) ended up being one of the most complex shots of Michos’ whole career: “real footage instead of a 3D rebuild, finding a camera angle that would work for the splitting effect, dealing with shaky footage, masking out every object to divide the world into parts, filling the gaps left behind and retiming it all to the music,” says Michos. “It took many tests to get the workflow down, so by the final version I was already prepared.” The result is the encapsulation of Gen Z aesthetics – inventive, hyperactive and most importantly, created by young voices that will soon dominate the visuals effects game. Michos is an artist to keep an eye on.