music produced by Quelle Chris
video directed & animated by Quelle Chris
Debuted @ WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/jean-grae...
Quelle on making ZERO:
Mostly a camera, Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. I've been animating since my early teens so I know the basics but whenever I was at a loss for how to do something good ol YouTube would be the 4th man as far as equipment goes. Actually YouTube is probably the most important part. From tutorials (the best tutorials always have the worst music) to watching hours and hours and hours of game playthroughs and speedruns to get the authenticity and pace of the video just right. I wanted watchers to have a phantom joystick moment. I used games I played a lot as a kid along with ones I discovered as an adult as inspiration and also canvas at times. Which brings me to another important tool in making this video. I couldn't have done it (in the given window of time) without the world of kick ass designers and programmers who share their old sprite sheets and codes and without the community of die hard rippers who share and archive their ripped, cleaned and edited sprites and background art from games across many different forums and websites. When i couldn't get something to look, feel of move authentically I'd use parts of or modified sprite designs from a wide variety of games. So a super shout out and credit is due to the gaming, sprite and archiving community especially those whose rips were used in the video. I initially wanted it to be more of an 8 bit game (think NES) for the sake of time but I've always been into the early 90's Amiga, SEGA and PC art style of games. Specifically point and click adventures and the more tactical, slower paced cinematic platformers like Another World, BlackThorne, Flashback, Prince of Persia, etc.
I was really loose with the story once I decided the visual era and style of game it was going to be. I knew it was going to start with a long story cutscene with the main villain overlooking the city and I knew I wanted it to end with someone getting kicked off a rooftop or through a window. The rest pretty much wrote itself. Jean has always had her assassin storty running through all of her albums so I decided to go with that as a base and squeeze in as many references to may favorite type of games as I could (I had to cut the RPG, 2D fighter Point and click to keep the video cohesive and the story moving).
The last part was making the 8 bit versions of the instrumentals for Zero and OhSh. I did those using Ableton and an Alesis controller. Pretty straight forward stuff. By the time I was wrapping up the video I got so into the world of design and programming and how games were made that I started getting the software and learning how to program myself. I plan on having at least 3 fully playable levels done by the end of 2018.
Sounds Beautiful Like The Truth
Mello Music Group, 2018
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