Renowned British band Radiohead, already viewed as innovative and unconventional in its recent approach to music distribution, has once again pushed out the boat of invention by enabling enthusiastic technophile fans to physically remix the ambitious video for new single ‘House of Cards’.
Radiohead makes its latest music video an open-source promotional experiment. Image: Radiohead/Google.
After offering up album ‘In Rainbows’ through a distribution method that involved leaving online consumers to decide how little or how much they would pay for the downloaded record, Radiohead has now produced an eerie video that pushes creative technology by utilising lasers and computer data to create its three-dimensional imagery rather than traditional cameras and lighting rigs.
The added attraction associated with the already-impressive music video for House of Cards is that the band has formed a promotional partnership with search giant Google Inc., through which it will provide capable developers with access to the video’s code so that they can manipulate it to create a different version of the final product.
“I always like the idea of using technology in a way that it wasn't meant to be used, the struggle to get your head around what you can do with it,” outlined Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke regarding development of the new video. “I liked the idea of making a video of human beings and real life and time without using any cameras, just lasers, so there are just mathematical points -- and how strangely emotional it ended up being.”
According to a Guardian report, Radiohead engineered the original video by utilising a scanning system called Geometric Informatics, which creates structured light to capture 3D imagery in close-up. The band also added atmospheric exterior shots of suburban Los Angeles to the video by using an advanced Velodyne LIDAR system, which applies 64 lasers rotating 360 degrees at 900 times each minute to capture large-scale environments.
Anyone interested in adding their personal touch to the typically melancholic ‘House of Cards’ video can do so by clicking here to download its data from Google’s Code site via a Creative Commons license. Google also offers an accompanying visualiser to aid progress. The Guardian points out that other video-editing software such as QuickTime Pro, iMovie and open-source application VirtualDub should also be compatible.
However, be warned, early YouTube feedback indicators from those already toying with and posting their rendered 3D footage suggests that creating convincing data visualisation from the code is far from easy.
Click here to watch the video as it is by default -- before creative developers put their own open-source spin on its visuals. The link also provides access to a short explanatory film that highlights how the initial video was made using its different technological approaches.
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