Radiohead Stacks "Cards" w/Camera-less Gimmick

Absolutely no film stock was harmed in the making of their new video.

By Blurt Staff

Whew… talk about a dense-reading press release. We don’t even know where to begin so we’ll just hand it over to you, dear readers…

 
In keeping with their decision not to make conventional promotional music videos for any of the tracks on In Rainbows, Radiohead used absolutely no cameras in the making of its new "House Of Cards" clip.

Instead, "House Of Cards", directed by James Frost of Zoo Films, was created utilizing two technologies: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar. The Geometric Informatics scanning system employs structured light to capture detailed 3D images at close proximity, and was used to render the performances of Radiohead's Thom Yorke, the female lead and several partygoers. The Velodyne Lidar system uses multiple lasers to capture large environments in 3D, in this case 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute, capturing all of the exterior scenes and wide party shots. Geometric processed their own data while 510 Systems processed the Velodyne Lidar data. The data was then manipulated by Union Editorial and the Syndicate to create the final result.

Google will premiere the video early next week at http://code.google.com/radiohead

Additionally, the band will be making available the data used to create the video for fans to manipulate into their own unique short clips. A short documentary detailing the unique process used to create the video will also be available via this link, as will 3D renderings of selected scenes.  

Of Radiohead's decision to eschew cameras for the "video," Thom Yorke commented, "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 round what you can do with it. 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."