Kinect music videos are not new. There have already been a few like this one from Echo Lake. But while impressive, it’s not nearly as impressive as this.
You are looking at “Catalina” by Portguese duo Moullinex, which is made up of Luis Clara Gomes and Luis Calçada. Gomes tells Kotaku that the video was shot in, well, a living room.
“We were inspired by CG videos featuring 3D scans, a technology which was very hard to experiment with mainly due to its price,” says Gomes. That price dropped significantly thanks to the Kinect, which makes a simple 3D scanner available to the masses at an affordable price.
And it wasn’t just the hardware, there’s an active community of folks who are doing all sorts of interesting things with Kinect – whether it be throwing hadoukens or tracking man boobs. “They’ve democratised this technology,” Gomes adds, “and hopefully now we’ll see more and more of this used in finished art “products”, and not just proofs of concept.”
The recording itself didn’t take that long, Gomes says. With the 8 or 9 small sequences that were filmed, they were able to use the program Cinema 4D to move data and create camera angles. “In the clip you’ll see different plotting methods, the points interacting with the audio, one point cloud, the bass player, morphing into another, the keyboard player, and so on,” Gomes says. “None of this is news, but what makes it interesting is the very human feel of the data, a feel that you can only by sampling ‘reality’.”
The footage they got felt cold, so the duo decided to add rain and give the video a vintage 3D feel in post production.
“We couldn’t have made this video without the work of the Kinect hackers’ community, so we want to keep what we did open and free, hoping that someone takes our code and projects and makes it even better,” Gomes says. For more nitty-gritty on how this video was created, check Moullinex’s Tumblr.
Moullinex’s latest EP “Chocolat” is available through Gomma Records. The group put out a 12-inch called “Superman” last year.
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