Profile of Erik Wernquist
I want to
introduce a very talented 3D animation producer to you guys, called Erik
Wernquist. Wernquist was born in Stockholm, Sweden and is most famously known
for the creation of Crazy Frog, a CGI-animated character, formerly named The
Annoying Thing. The character is equally annoying as hilarious. The Crazy Frog
imitates the sound of a two-stroke engine and is probably one of most-used cellphone
ringtones in the early 2000s. The visual artefact that I want to focus on
however, is his music video for Jamie XX’s “Gosh”. The video shows us a magnificent
view on an alien moon of Jupiter, and these photos were made by NASA’s Juno, a
probe that has been launched to Jupiter in 2011. In addition, Wernquist throws
in some awesome science-fiction visuals of extra-terrestrial intelligent life,
and it makes you wonder what could be possible. The locations in Wernquist’s
video for “Gosh” are digital recreations of actual places in the Solar System,
some of them made from real photos and map data if that is available.
Wernquist uses the
dropping beats of “Gosh” to change from shot to shot, which makes the music and
the visuals really complement each other. Wernquist has been collaborating with
NASA to visualize their missions to Mars and the Moon. In 2015, he made the
short film ‘New Horizons’, a promotional video for the NASA New Horizons
spacecraft. This project is about the historic reconnaissance mission to dwarf
planet Pluto and its moons – the first ever exploration of this system in human
history. The mission will tell us a lot about the origins and outskirts of our
Solar System, and is currently one of NASA’s highest priorities. Because of him
working together with NASA, his visuals could show our future space mission in
a very accurate way.
Another interesting
project of Wernquist is ‘Wanderers’, a short film of how human future in space
could look like, if ever possible. This project is a good example of how he
uses real photos in his 3D animations as a template for his science-fiction work.
The first photo is taken by Juno, showing Jupiter’s moon Europa, in front of
the surface of the giant gaseous planet. The second photo is a screenshot from ‘Wanderers’,
and shows some people on Europa, with Jupiter in the back, and another one of
Jupiter’s Moon – Io – in between.
In the making of his
science-fiction visuals, he has also based a lot of his work on science-fiction
authors Kim Stanley Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke, as well as Chesley
Bonestell, a master of space art paintings. I’ve added one of Benestell’s
paintings here to give you an impression of his work.
You can view his
work on his website. I truly recommend taking a look at it.
You can enjoy the
visuals (and music!) from “Gosh” via the following link:
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