In the space of a few days this video for new fuzzy-guitar merchants Echo Lake by Brighton-based filmmaker Dan Nixon has gone viral in a big way, and its not hard to see why.

Dan’s video for the band’s Young Silence (out on Feb 14) has strong similarities with Radiohead laser-mapping video for House Of Cards by James Frost from a couple of years ago – but clearly wasn’t made with expensive pro-level laser LIDAR scanners. In fact it was done with the ingenious leftfield application of new mainstream technology – the Microsoft Kinect.

Dan shot this band performance video using a Kinect as a camera, and then spent several weeks after that transforming the digital footage by hand using “custom applications developed in Cinder” and publicly available Kinect hacking files.

Responding to questions about the likeness between his vid and the House of Cards video
on the thread under his Vimeo link, Dan says: “It uses the same basic idea – although I hadn’t seen that video in full until yesterday. What the House of Cards video did (from what I can tell) was use two different techniques to measure data and then map it in a point cloud. What this video does is use the Kinect to get that depth data and then map it into a point cloud…

“So yeah, depth data mapped in a point cloud is the same. They also did some really cool things with particle effects too I noticed. I did some stuff with how the point cloud’s points are coloured.”

Er, quite straightforward really.

Echo Lake
Young Silence
Director: Dan Nixon
DoPs: Dan Nixon, Dom Jones
Post: Dan Nixon
Label: No Pain In Pop

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