One of my favourite music videos of the past year is OK Go's Impulse Purchase.
OK Go frontman Damian Kulash described the origin of his collaboration on this with directors Lucas Zanotto and Will Anderson to Live Music Blog:
“It began with my love of Lucas Zanotto’s short animated loops — they’re so inventive, so full of joy, always delivering little doses of the kind of wonder we’re always searching for in our own videos. So I thought the universe flowing from his brain might be the perfect setting for a lyric video, but when I reached out to him, he had a more ambitious project to propose: a ‘live performance’ with me AS one of his characters. Suddenly it was a much weirder, more wonderful project than what I’d envisioned,”
To make the video, Damian performed the character via a live facial motion-capture app on an iPhone. The app used OSC (the Open Sound Control protocol) to send his real-time eye, lip, and head movements into Blender, where they drove the character’s erratic facial expressions on the fly.
What makes this true digital puppetry, not just digital animation, is that Damian isn't simply supplying reference material for an animator to interpret; he is performing the character through a real-time control system. His face is the input device. Blender is the puppet stage.
Best of all, in keeping with Blender Studio's open source filmmaking ethos, a demo version of this set-up has been released for anyone to try:
To run the free demo you will need to download the following:
- Blender 4.5 LTS (the latest long-term support release, not the newest version of Blender)
- The .blend demo file
- Blender Studio's bespoke Foscap add-on
- The Live Link Face app for iOS or Android
The full .blend production file used to make Impulse Purchase is also available for Blender Studio subscribers. Complete step-by-step instructions can be found on the Blender Studio Blog.
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