What is the film about?

‘No Son of Mine’ is an adrenaline-filled, animated music video which follows a character through a night of wild debauchery and violence – from strip clubs to bar fights to high speed driving – before a full punchline reveal of the character’s true identity. The film uses stark black and white visuals, punctuated with green and is filled with quick cuts, chaotic action and disorientating close-ups to deliver knockout punches. Nothing is overly smooth or slick, but the high contrast, explosive music video for ‘No Son of Mine’ works to serve up a shot of pure adrenaline straight to the heart.

What influenced it?

The initial brief was cut the live action footage with frames of CGI animation to tell a sketch-book style character story, reminiscent of the fast-paced, first-person perspective in ‘Smack My B*tch Up’ by Prodigy. Being huge fans of the hard-boiled storytelling and gritty aesthetics from comic book noir, such as the work of the iconic Frank Miller, Bomper worked to execute the music video in similar fashion.

A little background information...

After working with RCA on Tyler Childers ‘Country Squire’, RCA approached Bomper Studio with live action footage of the Foo Fighters, filmed by director Danny Clinch for Jimmy Kimmel Live!, with the desire to use this footage and combine it with CG animation to release an epic music video in a tight-turnaround.

How was the film made?

The production took place from late December 2020 – January 2021. Director Emlyn Davies and co-director Josh Hicks worked to develop a visceral tale that was hard and fast, charting the spectrum of lusts: blood, money, drugs and alcohol. This story was then broken up into a series of vignettes, to be intertwined with live action footage of the band.

The first point of call in the production was to create minimal, instantly readable environments. This stylistic approach not only worked well for the stark and contrasted aesthetic, but lended itself well to the deadline, as asset creation did not require as much detail as a full-scale, elaborately textured 3D production.

For the characters, Bomper approached texture artist, Thomas Shaban, to create inky and contoured, hand-painted textures with a limited palette. Against the environments, the linework jumps the tracks into raw expressionism; drawing you into the world of the hard-hitting characters. Keeping in with the style, the film was built to lower frame rate of 12FP.

To keep the film feeling as a cohesive whole, Bomper edited the live action footage and treated it; doing R&D to hand-paint frames from each shot and then running it through an EBSynth to match the grungy, stark, duotone output of the CG shots.