A music video you can play: Indie Rock in the Unity Engine

For almost as long as video games have existed, they have enjoyed a close relationship with pop music. As early as 1983, Bally-Midway teamed up with Journey to make a game full of licensed songs and the digitized faces of the band members (which followed more than a decade of pinball machines with megaton tapes), and it says nothing about media sensations like “Pac-Man fever.”

Meanwhile, interactive musical experiences, somewhat outside the firm ‘gaming’ realm, began to emerge in the CD-ROM era. It ranges from simple computer-exclusive content slapped on a normal album’s data clip to full-fledged multimedia software featuring the likes of David Bowie and Prince.

So the synergy of play and pop music is littered with different ‘firsts’, and this week a modest music video by a Texas indie band might not register as a particularly big deal. This is not a Doem clone with Iron Maiden in the lead role or a hilarious light gun game with Aerosmith in the lead role. But this ‘playable’ music video undoubtedly ushers in a new era: one in which video game engines, and therefore a game mentality, have become completely fundamental in pop culture.

WASD to measure

“Greatness Waitress” is the main single for Waitsgiving, Fishboy’s upcoming seventh album. This longtime pop-rock band from Denton, Texas, compares favorably with the likes of They Might Be Giants, Weezer and Ben Folds. In his latest single, nasal singing sadly twists a meta-narrative yarn over a struggling indie rock band, and the words slip across heavy percussion piano and fuzzed-out guitar: I perform regularly, you have to come and watch, but you can not watch, the group takes a breather and the time we took was specifically taken / waited … for a great idea.

The single sounds appropriate for a grim basement room or a friend’s backyard, somehow both loud and intimate, with an animated, teenage cheer. His music video follows and follows fictional, geriatric band members as 3D-displayed comic book characters (drawn by lead singer and songwriter Eric Michener) on a ramshackle stage. For a hint on what the band really looks like, a series of TVs flash photos and video clips throughout the song.

This is the group’s first music video to be rendered in 3D, but in an appropriate indie rock way, it is not the result of a Pixar-caliber computer farm delivering every frame at impeccable levels. ‘Greatness Waitress’ video was built instead with the instant version flexibility of the Unity 3D game engine, and its limited geometry means it can work on most computer games. To prove it, the group decided to keep the indie spirit alive by launching the video as an interactive executable program; you can even “play” it inside a web browser. This build removes the intentional cinematography of the YouTube version, allowing viewers to WASD their environment.

Hang back and look at the whole band. Get awkwardly close to the lead singer. Or flip through the geometry of the entire video, cut through polygons and find Easter eggs.

Rock god + Dunk Lord

In an email interview with Ars Technica, Eric Michener of Fishboy said that he had previously applied his skills as a freelance video editor to previously budgeted music videos. “I work a lot in After Effects, but somehow it never occurred to me to use a game engine this way,” he says.

This idea came about thanks to the excitement of director, artist and animator Dann Beeson, who connected with Michener via Instagram as a Michele fan. The duo have bonded over a number of things – love for the original Monkey planet films, coupled with the singer’s experience with multimedia album projects (especially Fishboy albums that come with Michener’s own full-length graphic novels).

“I did not realize he was a game developer,” Michener says. “I just saw cool 3D models that were their own artwork.”

Indeed, Beeson has some serious chops on his resume: recently he worked as the sole 3D artist and animator for the beautiful NBA Jam tribute Dunk Lords, built with Andy Hull of Spelunky programming fame. When Beeson and Michener started talking about a possible collaboration (which Beeson admits it was a gimmick to listen to a Fishboy album early on), Beeson already had a workflow in mind: the translation of Michener’s 2D art in animated 3D characters; model, texture and direct the “set” in Maya and Blender; and the use of Unity to compile the assets.

“I’ve been making games for a good decade now and never really thought about merging the two disciplines of music and games,” Beeson adds. But the process of using a game engine on a music video was a revelation, he says, especially compared to trying to make animation projects completely on their own. “Delivering just a second of animation can take hours,” he says. “If you need an edit of a recording, there’s you all night.”

Meanwhile, ‘Greatness Waitress’ worked out as a humble-scale project that required ‘about an evening’ to build loop animations for each modeled character. “The lip-sync was done in a kind of weird way,” Beeson says. “I found a way to sketch movements or do puppetry in Blender. I ran the song and scaled a circle up and down to make it look like a mouth. It looked better than it was. was right. ” It only took him about 2 minutes and 30 seconds – ‘exactly how long the song is’, he notes. After setting up the virtual set for a deliberately filmed video, Beeson and Michener gave the assets a second chance for more interactive fun – including teasing about the story of the full-length album “rock opera”.

“More and more common”

Michener is careful in answering technical questions about the video, and he wonders aloud how many other video production projects are based on popular, easy-to-use engines. (If you are not so familiar with the concept, Ars Technica has previously discussed Jon Favreau’s latest use of the Unreal Engine on movies and TV series.) But for him, the lack of technical understanding is part of the point. .

“I love that you can watch this video as if it were a virtual concert,” says Michener (not to mention how few of those we’ve enjoyed in the last 12 months). “I know it’s been a bit of a thing lately, but probably not on a small scale like this for a small indie band like Fishboy.” Indeed: only Michener and Beeson did any work on the video, with the singer praising Beeson’s ability to ‘turn with my ideas’.

“I’ve seen a few other short films and demos in Unity and Unreal, but my prediction is that it’s going to get more and more common,” Beeson adds.

Thanks to its deliberate simplicity, ‘Greatness Waitress’ is unlikely to win traditional awards for ‘music video’. But how many music videos can you think of that can take control, live within a miniature concert, and look at what perspective you want? At present the answer is limited; even 360-degree and immersive VR options for concerts and videos tend to plant viewers on specific seats, as opposed to Fishboy inviting viewers to search for secrets (and cut through the geometry). But filthy unity and unreal access will surely change that reality as more artists and musicians devise clever ways to replicate the actual concert experience – and as a precursor to interactive music fun, the enchanting accessibility of this project is indeed its “Greatness.”

List by Eric Michener / Dann Beeson