KromA looks ‘Golden’ with colorful Scott vid

“XSI is just a lot faster than (Alias|Waverfront’s) Maya…the quality is higher, the user interface is great, and clients like it.”

Sometimes it’s the simplest visual effect shot that’s the most illuminating.

For Jill Scott’s new video “Golden,” the debut single from her new “Beautifully Human” album, the visual effects team at KromA turned the R&B songbird into an animated Lite Brite.

Midway through the video, Scott passes a girl who is sitting on a street corner playing with the toy. A close-up reveals that the girl has formed the light pegs into an uncanny likeness of Scott. The lights animate and appear to sing the song’s lyric.

Bert Yukich, who owns the 3-year-old effects shop KromA with his wife, and the studio’s executive producer, Amy Yukich, says achieving the effect was as simple as getting the video’s director Chris Robinson to drop the light box off after the shoot.

“We gave the Lite Brite to our CG animator, who built a model of it in SoftImage XSI,” Bert Yukich says. “It wasn’t terribly difficult; the trouble was getting it right. It was a sort of tedious process to get all those little lights to match Scott’s movements.”

KromA used a moving image of Scott’s face as reference and applied color to the pegs to form the singer’s face and to animate the drawing appropriately.

The team served up 60-70 shots for the video using a range of 2-D and 3-D effects animated in SoftImage XSI and composited in Avid DS.

Bert Yukich notes that when it comes to computer effects, KromA is a dedicated Avid shop.

“XSI is just a lot faster than (Alias|Waverfront’s) Maya,” he says. “The quality is higher, the user interface is great, and clients like it. When comparing (Avid’s) DS to (Discreet’s) Fire and Inferno, DS has all the same tools as both of those combined. And it has a better paint system, too.”

Later on, the “Golden” video features a series of “snapshots” of Scott’s family and friends with funny animated captions.

“I wrote out the captions and used a feature of the Avid DS to reveal them as if they were being written by hand,” KromA compositor Evan Guidera says. “I gave the captions different looks depending on who was writing them. The script for Jill, for example, is different from the more childish one I used for her kids.”

Guidera also used the Avid DS to perform extensive color correction work to achieve consistency from scene to scene and to make Scott stand out from the background by giving her a golden tone.

KromA spent about a week on the video and relied on a team of three people. Next up from KromA are the Modest Mouse video “The Ocean Breathes Salty” and a Blink-182 video that features the band members in a three-split effect.

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Those looking to see the year’s most innovative music videos and digitally enhanced narrative projects can catch the Los Angeles leg of the Resfest tour, which kicks off tonight with a short films program and an opening-night party featuring the first U.S. performance by Japan’s turntablist outfit Hifana at the Egyptian Theatre.

The festival showcases innovative videos, short films, film screenings, parties and tours of local motion graphics shops Motion Theory, Brand New School, Blind and Stardust.

Resfest L.A. wraps up Sunday with a Jonathan Glazer retrospective and a closing-night party featuring a live performance by the band Midnight Movies.