A collaboration between director Gemma Yin Taylor, and creative technologist Pierre Tardif to create a lyric video for Sigrid's Sucker Punch in augmented reality.

GEMMA YIN TAYLOR:

"We have collaborated before, but only on music for my animations, as Pierre’s hobby outside of coding is sound design. We had been looking for ways to bring our ideas to life, waiting for the right project to come up. When Sigrid’s team approached me about making a new lyric video for Sucker Punch it was the perfect opportunity to try something with augmented reality. The team are really open to new ideas so let us run with it. It would be the fourth lyric video that I have created for Sigrid so I have a thorough understanding of her style and aesthetic which I knew would lend itself to this bold/experimental approach.

"I worked on the video concept, design and direction alongside Pierre who set to work on developing an app which would place the lyrics within augmented reality - live within 3D space as you look through the camera of the device. Using Openframeworks -creative coding framework - for iOS and ARKit to create the apps, Pierre created a range of effects to apply to the text. Some effects were achieved using real-time feed of the camera, such as texture mapping on the sides of a polygon, or rotation speed averaging. We filmed some of the lyrics with Sigrid, who was really open and responsive to this relatively foreign way of working. The rest of the footage was filmed in various locations in Europe.

"This way of working turned the process on its head for me - instead of animating all of the lyrics manually, the text was captured live in space in response to the movement of the camera. You have to be creative in a different way - by using the world around you and the device to the best use in that moment. We were free to shoot virtually anywhere with a very inconspicuous kit and zero implications, as no-one questions people filming or photographing innocuous scenes on their phones. There is a wildness in the way we filmed it which complements the energy of the track - a dynamism that I would normally have to create using software. Once we had captured the footage of the lyrics with various different effects, I just had to edit all of the recordings afterwards to be timed with the track. The film has a ‘smartphone’ aesthetic which mirrors the masses of social content that populates our streams every day, but the augmented reality text and graphics gives it a really fresh and distinctive twist."