Dutch Wife [Inspiration]

‘Dutch Wife’ is a new short film by Jesse Kanda, a visual artist based in London.

We have asked him to briefly walk us through his work process which utilizes tools such as Maxon Cinema 4D, Adobe After Effects, and Ableton Live.

JK: The whole thing started when I was walking along a canal in Clapton and saw all the greens floating around. I took these initial test photos with my phone.

JK: The girl is a modified combination of a couple of free 3D models I found. I textured her head with the stitched up phone pictures and moved it across. It looked nice as stills, but the animation was predictably a bit rigid.

JK: I went back to the canal, held my video camera out with a tripod and a mic stand and spent the day taking footage.

JK: I then swapped the footage (image sequences) with the old texture.

JK: I setup an IK rig for the girl so I could position her how I’d want her. This plays a bigger roll in the ending. The body distortions you see in this scene and in the feet are displacement deformers with animated noise and falloff.

JK: The main scene in the film was done with dynamic metaballs spinning and colliding around her head. I added some junk that might be floating down the canal, but kept it quite subtle as I didn’t want it to end up looking like an environmental protest film.

JK: I wanted something a bit funny and crazy at the end, so I made a bunch of recordings of the limbs moving around using Cappucino and made an edit out of that.

JK: I do my own music as well; layers of chopped up samples from films, my iTunes, freesound.org, past recordings, etc.

MT: Thanks Jesse.

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Jesse Kanda is an independent graphic/motion designer, director and visual artist based in London. Upon spending 3 years at London design studio Hi-ReS! working on projects for various international brands such as Chanel, Channel 4, Dolce&Gabbana, The Economist, Issey Miyake, and Nokia, he now works on a freelance basis from his own studio.

More work can be seen on jessekanda.com

Previously: Waking From A Coma [Inspiration] by Jesse Kanda …