Radiohead – House of Cards (Video Made Without Cameras)

The Guardian had an interesting article about the video for the new Radiohead single House of Cards.

Radiohead has employed a scanning system, called Geometric Informatics, that produces structured light to capture three-dimensional images in close-up. Then, for some atmospheric location shots, an advanced Velodyne Lidar system, which uses multiple lasers to capture large environments, has been used to create scenes of suburban Los Angeles.

And, following on from their ground-breaking  honesty box system for selling In Rainbows, the album House of Cards is taken from, the boys have now opened up the code for the video to allow fans to create their own versions. From The Guardian again,

Furthermore, [Radiohead] has combined with Google to release the data (although not the music) using a Creative Commons licence, which you can download from the Google Code site.

Google has also provided a handy visualiser to help you play around with the code, although, theoretically at least, you should be able to mashup the data on a range of video editing applications, including QuickTime Pro and the open-source VirtualDub. You should be able to use iMovie on the iPhone as well.

There’s a YouTube group where users can share their finished versions. To be honest, I seem to remember someone like The Orb or Meat Beat Manifesto doing this with songs about 13 years ago, where they released all the components of a track on a CD Rom and encouraged fans to make their own remixes (can anyone else remember this?)

Still, talent imitates, genius steals and House of Cards, and Radiohead of course, are bloody genius.

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