What happens when you invite five of the most innovative international digital artists and designers equipped with powerful Z by HP workstations to collaborate around an energized dance anthem from Alt-Pop German rock duo Milky Chance? You get “Synchronize,” a fantastical, otherworldly journey into the colorful minds of Z by HP global ambassadors Orlando Arocena, Bradley G Munkowitz aka GMUNK, Nidia Dias, Jody MacDonald, and Rik Oostenbroek, inspired by the sounds of guitarist/singer Clemens Rehbein and bassist/percussionist Phillipp Dausch, aka Milky Chance. The new video for “Synchronize” was released today and can be viewed online.
“Synchronize” is a synth-filled track, described by Clemens Rehbein in American Songwriter Magazine as, “when you’re in love and feel that perfect synchronization with someone, it’s almost as if nothing else matters…your worries, your anxieties, they just disappear, and all that’s left is love.” The ambassadors, provided with product and payment from HP, are a team of creative professionals who push the boundaries of their craft. They took that cue and came together across the Netherlands, Germany, the United States, Columbia, and Portugal to contribute inspiration from their respective fields and corners of the planet to produce a new music video for the song.
Z by HP first challenged its global ambassadors to bridge geographic divides in 2021, during the height of the pandemic lockdown, in the production of a short film called “The Living System” using the previous generation desktop workstations to evolve their creative skillset. In this second effort, with access to the latest generation workstations, these incredible artists were challenged to reimagine global collaboration, creating a computer-generated music video with multiple voices and a singular vision.
The video takes the viewer on a ride through hyper-real landscapes and lushly layered syncopated visuals timed to highlight the rhythm of the track. The stunning imagery was created using 3D simulations and custom assets, created using real-time 3D and AI-powered tools. The data demands of these advanced workflows required rigorous performance and robust capabilities supported in Z workstations.
“We’ve collaborated with visual artists before, but never so many all at once. We wanted to let the ambassadors do their thing, so we tried to stay out of their way as much as possible, and trusted them to make something great once they shared the initial treatment. Synchronize has been a fan favorite since it came out, so we think our fans will be very excited to see a new visual interpretation of this song. It was very cool to see how the different artists interpreted the song and how it all came together at the end. We think it looks very cool and we hope that you all like it as much as we do,” added Clemens.
Synchronized on Z by HP Desktop Workstations
The five artists listened to the track selected by Milky Chance and then came together to collectively define the creative direction, mood, color, and feel of the music video.
Rik Oostenbroek is an accomplished Dutch visual artist known for his use of vibrant color, who worked on this project from Hilversum, near Amsterdam in The Netherlands. “I love the song. It spoke to me in textures and colors, and I envisioned bringing it to life in a fun moving-image way using waves and clouds and elemental things coming together to form a new visual reality.”
Contributing to the project from her homebase in Porto, Portugal, Nidia Dias is a director known for her use of advanced technology in design. “Each of us put together a mood board of what we wanted to do, we all went for the same tones in colors, and all chose visuals that were nature and environment-related,” explained Nidia. “Not only is the song called ‘Synchronize,’ but all of us were synchronized in this moment on what visuals we could create for the song.”
Jody MacDonald is a filmmaker and award-winning photographer, traveling around the world twice by 60ft catamaran and most recently through the Himalayas by motorcycle to expose the last untamed corners of the planet. “I’ve been listening to Milky Chance for a long time so was excited at the chance to work on this video—and was even more excited when I realized how environmentally conscious they are as a brand.” she shared. “The song made me think about how synchronized humans are in nature, and aligned with what I was experiencing visually in the Himalayas.” Jody’s stunning landscapes, captured by drone in the Spiti Valley and Zanskar Valley in India, feature throughout the video both as standalone sequences and as elements sampled and collaged by the other ambassadors.
Working on the latest generation of Z desktop workstations helped the global ambassadors push their workflow limits and evolve as artists, with GMUNK experimenting with AI, Nidia adding Unreal Engine to her toolkit and Rik moving into 3D simulations for the first time, thanks to compute power that didn’t hold them back. “It’s really important for us to be able to move assets around and try different things. I can, for example, incorporate Jody’s drone footage into my backgrounds built in Unreal Engine–or use some of the landscapes that Rik is creating and vice versa. With all of us working on the latest-gen Z4 and Z8 Fury desktop workstations, it’s easy to combine our efforts,” said Nidia.
Extreme Compute Fuels AI-Driven VFX
Inspired by the song’s repeating lyric, “smoke in the sky,” globally renowned Berkeley, CA-based director and digital artist GMUNK gravitated toward creating visuals of rotating clouds enhanced with AI-augmented natural elements. He used EmberGen, a real-time fluid simulation software from JangaFX, together with AI-powered tools including Topaz Labs, and experimented with Stable Diffusion to morph cloud simulations in various iterations of his work.
“EmberGen is based on real-world physics with controls to manage combustion, emission of fuel, temperature, flames, and smoke, and it’s up to the artist to combine these ingredients to determine how they react in the final simulation. It runs 100% on the GPU. Using EmberGen on the Z8 Fury is just bliss. It’s like being a conductor in an orchestra in Vienna. It’s fantastic, and it’s so much fun,” said GMUNK. “I also use the GPU-accelerated AI tool Topaz Labs to interpolate slowdowns of smoke simulation flythroughs. I slow down the footage two-to-four times to get better results out of Stable Diffusion.”
GMUNK has also been using Autodesk Maya as his 3D modeling and animation software of choice for 15 years. “The Z8 Fury machine is a workhorse, I can throw anything at it and just let it run, it’s rendering Maya scenes almost in real-time. Depending on the software I’m running, it’s five to ten times faster than any other computer I’ve ever used.” For this project, he was working on a Z8 Fury equipped with a 36-core Intel® Xeon® W9 CPU, 265 GB of RAM, 7TB of storage, and two NVIDIA RTX™ 6000 Ada GPUs.
With a software kit that is heavily weighted with GPU-accelerated tools, GMUNK takes full advantage of the Z8 Fury’s powerful compute capabilities combined with the latest generation RTX 6000 Ada graphics from NVIDIA. “The render engine that I use with Maya is Redshift. I use a terrain generation software called Gaia for building highly detailed landscapes. On the Z8 Fury, I can run these massive 225 million voxel simulations and they’re still very, very interactive where I can see exactly what I’m doing. It’s extraordinary to have this kind of computing power at my fingertips,” he added.
Performance Boosts Creative Experimentation
As with any work of digital art, whether it’s a feature film VFX sequence, an animated trailer or a CG music video, having the ability to iterate on a variety of looks and permutations always yields better creative results. Iteration takes time, and creating content on a more performant machine such as the Z8 Fury desktop workstation gives any team a competitive advantage.
“When starting out on this kind of project, it’s important to know that we’re all headed in the right creative direction–even if we all have our own visual ideas, it has to be cohesive. The fact that we can quickly test, iterate, render, and color grade on these powerful machines allows us to show, review, and progress much faster as a team,” commented Nidia.
Rik found that the Z8 Fury is rendering scenes four times faster than on his previous generation workstation. “Having that direct feedback is just much more fluent and allows me to take more risks in my work which now includes real-world physics and simulations that have to be calculated over time. In the past I would have had to turn down a project that required 200 images rendered in 8K resolution—but now it’s no longer a problem with the speed of the Z8 Fury.”
The capacity of the Z8 Fury—up to 56 cores in a single CPU, up to 2 TB of DDR5 memory, 136 TB of storage, and up to four high-end GPUs—enables artists to run multiple compute-intensive digital content creation tools simultaneously without slowing down, which helps keep artists in creative flow. “I often render something in Cinema 4D, then bring it into Adobe After Effects or Photoshop for refinement, so being able to run these tools side by side helps me be more creative, work more interactively, and get more direct feedback,” explained Rik. “The Z8 Fury is hardware that supports your ambition. I may have the crazy idea of doing smoke, clouds, water simulations, and all of these things that I’ve never done before, and it’s great not to have to worry about hardware limitations. I’m able to move forward with more creative confidence because this hardware doesn’t limit my creative vision.”
Rik and the other ambassadors contributed assets from each of their scenes to artist and ambassador Orlando Arocena who aggregated them to create the music video’s promotional poster.
Orlando, who creates art under the name “Mexifunk”, pushes vector art to new heights with a remarkable body of work that includes wildly original freestyle film posters and packaging for clients that include Marvel, Paramount, Lionsgate, Universal Pictures, and many others. His signature flavor of pop art blends hand-drawn 2D illustrations with hundreds of thousands of layers of vector-based imagery.
“I’m constantly pushing the boundaries of what is achievable with vector art, and the Z4 desktop workstation can keep up alongside me so I can run and create in bursts of spontaneity without having to wait for my machine to sync to my actions,” said Orlando. “As an artist, I’ve tried my best to uplevel what’s possible with Adobe Illustrator–and have had so much fun in that exploration on the Z because I can move forward confidently without worrying about performance bottlenecks. When I started to experiment with vector graphics I was creating images with maybe 2,000 anchor points–but today my average project has evolved to 120,000 anchor points with multiple colors, gradients, blends, and brush strokes, and that evolution is only possible because of the Z.”
The final poster is a visual representation of the project and the song, marrying hints of the landscape, colors and cloud formations featured in the video overlayed with five distinct hovering planes. Orlando reflected on bringing this project to life with the band and the team of Z by HP global ambassadors. “I am in awe of the talent and creativity in this group. For so many of us the lyrics in the song evoked visuals and themes from the natural world. This is a beautiful thing when you’re working in video and 3D simulation–but creating natural elements–liquids, sky, lighting and clouds in vectors forced me to really push the technology, and the results are very exciting.”
Learn more about this exciting collaboration by watching the behind-the-scenes making-of-reel. Visit Z by HP online to learn more about how the latest desktop workstations can bolster your creative vision.
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