Mirada on Creating the VFX for Katy Perry's Roar
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By: Meleah Maynard
The music video for Katy Perry's single, Roar, may have been shot at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, but it looks like the heart of the jungle thanks to an assortment of trained animals and the impressive array of visual effects created by Los Angeles-based Mirada. Working with Motion Theory directors Grady Hall and Mark Kudsi, Mirada had just three weeks to do all of the post-production for the nearly five-minute video.
Mindful of the challenging schedule, Mirada made the most of that time by employing a variety of software and hardware, including CINEMA 4D, After Effects, Houdini, Nuke and Flame. They also took the time to select the right artists, in-house and freelance, for every aspect of the project.
We wanted to pay homage to the Jane Of the Jungle style and genre, so finding the right artists for that look was crucial, recalls Jonathan Wu, Mirada's creative director. Tools are great because they allow artists to express themselves, but the artists really bring things to life.
Enhancing the Narrative
Though the post-production deadline was tight, the process was made easier by the fact that Mirada was actively involved in the making of the video from the beginning, starting with conception. And because Hall and Kudsi are well aware of what can be achieved in post-production, they planned their shots accordingly with input from the team at Mirada. We started talking right away about the visuals we would need to complement the story, anything that would help reinforce the narrative, says VFX supervisor Michael Shelton.
Shelton and Wu were also on set to partner with the directors on pinpointing instances where the narrative could be enhanced with effects. That kind of input on creative decisions made the project even more fun and challenging, Shelton says. It also helped ensure that they would have everything they needed when it was crunch time. When you shoot something as ambitious as this, it's a constantly evolving picture that reveals itself as the director makes decisions to improve the story and look of the video, so you have to be there to roll with the punches and figure out the best approach.
By way of example, Shelton points to the moment when the crew realized that the green screen they had wasn't large enough to accommodate the size of the elephant they were shooting. So he was able to troubleshoot on set, knowing it would need to be rotoscoped as soon as post-production started.
Animals are always a wildcard on set, Shelton explains, because, like kids, you can never be entirely certain what they'll do. It's tricky because you have to wait and see what the animals can and can't do, he says, explaining that things like how the animal's trajectory changed when jumping form platform to platform often had to be massaged in post-production. This was exactly the case in shooting the tiger, so the tiger and Katy were shot as separate plates and composited together for the final shot.
A Team Effort
In all, there were 139 shots in Roar that incorporated visual effects, including 2D animation, matte paintings, particle effects, 3D and a lot of heavy compositing. Artists primarily worked in teams, handing shots off to the next person in the pipeline as required. Hours were long, but what kept people going (beyond energy drinks, snacks and coffee) was the energy and sense of camaraderie that surrounded the project. It was really a passion project because work like this doesn't come around very often, so everybody really embraced it and did their best, Shelton says.
One of the most striking visual effects in the video happens when Perry stoops by a pool of water and breaks into Roar's empowering chorus for the first time. As she sings, blinking fireflies move gracefully around her before coming together in the air to form the head of a roaring tiger. After first studying footage of how fireflies move and light up and dim back down, Mirada opted to use CINEMA 4D to create different iterations of the fireflies because the 3D software would allow them to make changes quickly and easily.
We knew we wanted the fireflies to hover and dissipate, but we needed to see what that looked like and make several changes, so we chose CIN EMA 4Dbecause it's artist friendly and fast, Shelton explains. Using several particle tools in CINEMA 4D, artists were able to alternate between MoGraph, Thinking Particles or X-Particles, whichever got the job done the fastest, depending on the shot. Mirada artists chose MoGraph for the ambient firefly shots because a basic random noise effector can animate several spheres around a general area. Setup was simple with few parameters and it provided realistic results, especially with CINEMA 4D's Physical Render Motion Blur setting that added the firefly trail.
The tiger roar shot was a bit more complicated. To create the fireflies that buzz around the environment and then gravitate towards the center to the tiger's head, a combination of X-Particles and Thinking Particles was used. X-Particles was faster to set up: only a volume emitter, an attractor and a few deflectors were needed to guide the fireflies to the center in a natural manner. Once the fireflies reached the center, they were killed off and Thinking Particles was used to emit from pre-rendered tiger footage to drive the firefly birth and color. Varying the intensity and direction in Thinking Particles made the roar very expressive and magical. After Effects was then used to add color and glow to the fireflies as well as add their reflections in the water.
CINEMA 4D was also used to help test techniques for the effect that called for a swarm of fireflies to gather and take the shape of a roaring tiger h
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Mirada on Creating the VFX for Katy Perry's Roar 
