Brazilian artist Emicida has released a music video for his song “Acabou, mas tem…,” directed and produced by Pedro Conti at Flooul Animation.
The video features animation as smooth as the flow of Emicida’s lyrics and beats. By using clockwork toy characters and sets, Conti gives it a playful stop-motion aesthetic that moves and evolves in gratifying ways befitting the song’s fluctuating nature.
Conti has known Emicida for several years, and has been a fan for far longer. The director told Cartoon Brew how excited he was to collaborate with the musician on his latest video:
I wanted to give something back by the beautiful music he does. His music helped me through a lot of moments of my life, especially after I lost my father back in 2018. I ended up doing a 3d print of Emicida and we met in his office.
The two have tried to work in the past, but the timing never worked out. This time around, their schedules aligned, although only briefly. According to Conti:
Production was tight in terms of deadline, so we had to come up with a really creative solution… The process was very collaborative between Emicida, my co-director Diego Maia, and myself. Similarly, my company Flooul Animation and Emicida’s company Laboratório Fantasma worked closely on this video.
Given their history and admiration for each others’ work, Conti says he was given free rein to develop and produce the video in the style of his choice:
We had a lot of freedom in how to approach the script, the visuals, and animation style for it. These boundaries we set really helped us to be very creative on editing and designing. The setup overall was simple, but we added a lot of complexity and variations to make each part of the song and video special.
Conti says he used the song’s narrative, about a person in a rough spot who longs to feel better, to guide the animation. Like the conflicted lyrics, the animation was meant to be incongruous, too:
We decided to use a very childish style and take this little character on a deep and intense journey.
As the song advances through mini-movements that shift in tempo and emotion, so too does the animation, getting more and more chaotic until finally, the song and the visuals resolve pleasantly together.
To develop the video’s stop-motion-inspired aesthetic, Conti and the team at his studio used Autodesk’s 3ds Max, Zbrush, and V-Ray for the cg animation and Blender for 2d animation. Post and editing were done in After Effects and Adobe Premiere.
