Created by Michael Fragstein – for the track Dagner by Dan Freeman and The Serious, a Berlin alt-indie group. Dagner is a Vimeo staff pick music video with over 79,000 plays and was nominated for the Berlin Music Video awards 2016. In the hands of true professionals like Art Director Michael Fragstein, X-Particles really is a powerful tool. 

About Michael Fragstein

Fragstein studied architecture and design at the Art Academy Stuttgart, starting as a 3D specialist working in the field of exhibition design, construction and architecture visualisation. His first animations were made for architects, but he soon realised the narrative potential of motion design and fortunately wanted to explore the possibilities. His Studio 'Büro Achter April' enables him to share his passion for design and animation with other like minded individuals. Taking inspiration from life itself, exhibitions, music, books, film festivals, watching animated video's, reading his favorite blogs, travelling and talking with friends.

Music video

With no brief to speak of, Michael had absolute freedom with the content of the music video. Taking inspiration from the song itself and paintings of contemporary artists such as Michael Borremans, Teo Treloar and old masters like Caravaggio. Numerous skype session with Dan Freeman, the whole process took nearly a year to complete.

Why X-Particles?

When we asked why X-Particles was used on this particular project, Michael replied "I had previously used X-Particles for a project in an abstract manner (Second Glance). It was a really joyful experience, and consequently, I wanted to expand my skills and dive deeper. Although I'm interested in technical aspects of animation, I'm not that proficient in TP and Xpresso. I think it would be really hard to create such striking results in such a short time without X-Particles."

"Getting started with X-Particles is really easy, it invites you to explore it in a very playful way. It's really well integrated into Cinema 4D and the possibilities seem to be endless. The results are surprising and indicate hidden creative directions."

We asked, "Is there a particular scene, where X-Particles made it easier to create the visuals you required?” Fragstein answered "I did not try to force things into a form that I’ve thought of before. I let myself rather be guided by the possibilities that X-Particles gave me and followed the forms that arose from the experiments."

Music: Dan Freeman And The Serious
Director: Michael Fragstein
Production Company: Büro Achter April
Set Design: Turan Tehrani
DoP: Rainer Sprenger
Performer: Igor Weiss
Grading: Walking On The Moon