Created in 2004 by Nathan Bezner and Jeff Heller, “Playground Love” is an unofficial music video to the “Air” song of the same name. Using Lightwave3D and After Effects to create the backround look, this found footage promotional project was made not only to show their capabilities as animators and editors, but also because they genuinely wanted to make and see the video.
Using animation from a Japanese television program titled “Kare Kano,” “Playground Love” falls more into the category of video art (or Infringement Art) rather than traditional film work.
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Wet Mango
Nice Nate, I had never seen this work by you. Really nice, I’m curious how you got the background the way you did too. Where the “Camera” noises part of hte song or added in?
Well done. Thanks for making it.
Thanks Rick – I’m really proud of this video. The background was created using Lightwave7 – the playground equipment was modeled and animated by myself, then the sky was added in the final render pass. The grass field was also done in Lightwave. Meanwhile, Jeff was making the petals in ParticleIllusion – the thing I like about that is no two petals move the same, each is an individual element. Then, we brought the layers into After Effects and did an old film pass using levels, tint, and a film-look plug-in. Then we composited the characters into the background and tracked them to the motion. It was fun!
As for the actual sounds of the sprockets, those were created by recording my film projector playing one of my old 16mm student films. Then, I edited that final recording down to actually place each ‘click’ in response to the frame shifts in the video. Time consuming, yes, but ultimately worth it in my opinion.