Re Up

For the release of Maxwell D’s single Re Up, I was responsible for creating the cover art, promotional animations and videos for his social media.

Behind The Process

During early concept discussions, Maxwell mentioned wanting the artwork to incorporate moments from the music video in a film tape-style. To bring this idea to life, I first created custom film tape strips in Photoshop and took screen shots from the music video in inserted them into the frames. I added film grain textures to give it a gritty, analogue feel, then exported them for use in 3D.

In Blender, I modelled a set of planes with bend modifiers to create a flowing, dynamic arrangement of the film tape. I UV unwrapped the planes and used the Shader Editor to apply the different strips as textures. I positioned the 3D text in the middle of the frame and placed a film strip featuring an image of Maxwell D at the center with a brick-textured backdrop to reflect the street-inspired theme of the track.

After setting up the scene, I experimented with the placement and flow of the film strips to create a balanced layout. I rendered multiple layers and brought them back into Photoshop for final compositing, including colour correction, additional textures, and subtle smoke effects to tie the whole piece together.

Promotional Animations

The goal of the promotional animations was to reflect the energy and visual identity of Maxwell D’s music video. I wanted the animation to feel connected to the original video by recreating key elements such as the Margate Beach setting and the featured cars.

The environment was created in Blender, using a mix of Quixel Megascans assets like decals and cliffs, along with custom models I modelled myself, including the road, railings and walls. The sky was created using a Sky Texture node, while the clouds were made from a cube with an animated noise texture to simulate movement. The oceean was generated using Blender's Ocean modeifier. I imported a BMW M4 model from Sketchfab, rigged it using the Rigacar add-on, and textured it to match its real-world counterpart.

I started with a straightforward animation of the car driving through the scene, then created 16 camera variations, each between 4 and 8 seconds long, to capture a variety of dynamic angles. These animations were rendered at 1080x1920, 25fps, using 256 samples. The shots were then edited together to form three final promo videos, with another batch rendered using a purple variation of the car, referencing the second car in the video.

A mist pass was added in Compositing to bring some fog to the scene. The final edits were done in Premiere Pro, where I also handled the colour grading. The text overlays were required to include the artist name, track title, producer credit, availibility and a pre-save/out now status. I needed to fit ll this information within social media guidelines to ensure it remained clear and visible on stories and reels. To solve this, I animated the text so the header changes after a set time, allowing the details to be shown without cluttering the visuals. The overlay was designed in Photoshop and animated in Premiere Pro.

Promotional Videos

I put together some short videos by cutting down parts of the music video, mainly focusing on the performance shots. The goal was to create quick, engaging clips to help promote both the music video and the single. I kept the edits simple with basic transitions and effects, and added some MOGRT YouTube templates to promote Maxwell D’s channel, as requested.

Music Video

As part of this project, I was responsible for developing the treatment for the music video. I created a short intro animation to the treatment, to convey the overall theme of we aimed to achieve. It was made using Blender using Geometry Nodes to animatee the text forming in the sand.

I was also involved in the shoot, which you can watch below. The entire music video was shot in just one day as part of the JGA Production Assistant Skills Bootcamp.