C4D and the Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience How Lord Danger helped Lonely Island realize their crazy ode/poem to '80s baseball.

Comedy Trio, The Lonely Island - Akiva Schaffer, Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone - met in junior high and have been collaborating on creative projects for years. After a longtime stint with Saturday Night Live, the troupe has lately become known for producing their own viral videos and studio albums. Among their releases is a Netflix comedy special called The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience. Billed as a "visual poem," the half-hour mockumentary features Samberg and Schaffer as 1980's baseball legends Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire (a.k.a. the Bash Brothers). The storyline imagines what their rap album and accompanying videos might have been like if they had really captured their experiences chasing the ladies, taking steroids, working out, being rich and occasionally pondering questions of love and the meaning of life and fame.

Mike Diva (Dahlquist), of the LA-based production company, Lord Danger, teamed up with Lonely Island's Akiva Schaffer to co-direct the special. Diva also assembled and led Lord Danger's team of global freelancers who worked on the show from concepting to completion over four months using a combination of Cinema 4D, After Effects, Blender and Nuke.

I asked Diva, and freelance contributors Ethan Chancer, Nick DenBoer and Josh Johnson, to talk about Lord Danger’s work on The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience, which features seven distinctly different music videos sung primarily by Samberg and Schaefer. Here’s what they had to say.

Mike Diva: Lord Danger is kind of an all-in-one shop, and we specialize in doing stuff that’s a little weird. Josh Shadid, our executive producer, founded the company a few years ago. I do a lot of our music videos and commercials, and we’re dipping our toes into the feature realm as well. My YouTube work is part of the reason for that. When I started there, I was uploading weird little videos that went viral, and I was able to move on to more commercial work because people liked my style. I kind of pride myself on making stuff that will capture the internet’s attention in one way or another.

M.D.: No, but I have. I’ve been a Lonely Island fan for over a decade, and they’re part of the reason I’m so into comedy. I had a meeting with a producer a while ago who told Akiva about me. I didn’t think much would come of it, but then Akiva hit me up to direct some visuals for their live show. They really liked what I did, so they brought me on to co-direct Bash Brothers and this was a very different project for me. I’m used to having three weeks to do a music video, but we had one month for post on seven music videos. It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

M.D.: They pretty much dumped all of the songs in my lap and I had a couple of months to come up with styles and treatments for each video. They were super down for everything and we went forward from there. We shot the majority of the content in four days and had one pickup day in Griffith Park where we shot Andy and Akiva wandering around looking confused.

Ethan Chancer: I’m a freelance director and VFX artists and Mike and I work together quite frequently. I was really kind of a generalist on this project. I did a lot of 3D modeling, compositing, rendering, lighting, rotoscoping and camera movement. Whatever was needed, I did. The music videos had different workflows, and some of them I helped with and some I was fully in charge of.

M.D.: Ethan made this really great short film, Amara when he was teaching himself to use Cinema 4D. It's really cool, so when we needed artsy shots for some of the special's interstitial moments, Ethan said we could use some from his short film. We also did some new shots where we took the actress out and replaced her with Andy Samberg doing the same stuff. We all got a kick out of throwing Andy into that beautiful environment, and it worked really well.

E.C.: I also worked with Mike on a fun scene where Andy's in a room with a bunch of carboard cutouts of Kathy Ireland. We got the Shutterstock shot of her and I extruded it with a vector spline and projected it on there, using Cinema 4D and Octane. I rebuilt that set in 3D so the light would match the live footage, and I tracked everything in C4D. The only thing real in the shot is Andy. This was more difficult than usual because the lens was so wide.

Nick DenBoer: I did some compositing and animation on a couple of sequences in “Bikini Babe Workout.” One of them was a bunch of floating rocks where you see the four of them standing together in a formation that somehow creates a four-parent-baseball baby. I also animated the baby in the floating bubble. The team at Lord Danger provided me with a pile of assets – 3D models, rotoscoped video clips and green screen footage. With Mike's direction, I built out the scenes, rendered various objects in Cinema 4D and composited it all together in After Effects.

Josh Johnson: I worked on the intro, “Oakland Nights” and “IHOP Parking Lot”. Officially, I was credited as lead compositor, but I also did a lot of 3D work and some tracking. Essentially, I was a generalist, which is often my role on projects I work on. For the “IHOP Parking Lot” sequence I handled the shots where a car needed to fly and land. The Back to the Future-like landing shot was complex. I had to make a CG car that looked like the real car in the shot that follows. Simulations and photoreal cars are not normally things you would greenlight knowing you only had a matter of days to work. But this project was so exciting, everyone on it just wanted to do their best.