doku_zen built Balming Tiger's "Janjan" video out of stop-motion puppets

The top question in the comments under doku_zen's Instagram post has nothing to do with Balming Tiger. "unforgettable. no AI at all?" someone asks. Takahashi Riku answers: "Yes!! No AI at all."

That exchange is most of every comment section now, and it's usually where the conversation stops. The better part is further down, where another animator asks how the thing was actually made, and Riku lays out the whole pipeline: stop-motion shot against greenscreen in Dragonframe, cut to transparency in After Effects, imported into Blender as flat planes, and rendered from there inside a 3D scene.

Which is to say they built it the way id built Doom. Adrian Carmack sculpted the first round of maquettes, and Greg Punchatz assembled the Spider Mastermind out of scrap Tupperware, PVC pipe, and a steel armature. The models were grabbed frame by frame off a video feed and crushed down to 256 colors so they could stand up in the game's world as flat cards. Riku has arrived at the same arrangement from the opposite direction: id did it because polygons were unaffordable, and Riku is doing it because a physical object photographed under real light carries a density that a modeled one doesn't. It shows. The video is a teeming, luminous crowd of grotesques that reads as solid even though almost none of it is.

We ran a piece on those Doom maquettes back in 2016 that ended on the line "we crave that human touch," and pointed at Lumino City and Jack King-Spooner's claymation as evidence. Ten years later, I was writing about King-Spooner again last week. The through-line holds: the cheaper the generated imagery gets, the more appetite there is for things that had to be touched.

"Janjan" opens the percussion-led stretch of Gongbu, the second album from the Seoul collective Balming Tiger, self-released in May. The video has picked up 426,000 views since July 16.

Watch it here. Riku's process replies are worth reading in full.