Hasta La Ideas

Directors Tim & Joe at Colonel Blimp have shot a music video for New Look‘s track Nap On The Bow using an XBox Kinect camera which emits thousands of infa-red dots to track a player’s movements in 3D…

There is an obvious comparison to James Frost’s House of Cards video for Radiohead from 2008 which wasn’t shot using traditional cameras but using lasers and scanners instead. However this video fuses footage taken with XBox’s Kinect camera with CG imagery created to complement it.

“For a while now we have been interested in the possibilities of using the Kinect to shoot live action in 3D,” say the directing duo Tim & Joe. “When we heard Nap On The Bow we instantly knew the rippling pixelated images that the Kinect captures would fit well with the song,” they continue. “We found ourselves imagining a whole underwater world and decided we could create something interesting that embedded the Kinect performance footage into a CG realisation of that world.

“The crude imagery you get from the camera led our approach – the CG all needed to have a similar lo-fi yet ethereal and beautiful feel. Chris Bristow (VFX artist) and Ryan Passmore (Real Flow artist) at Munky did a wonderful job creating such a coherent world combining a variety of techniques in which each shot feels new and interesting.

“Using the Kinect to shoot and then edit Sarah and Adam’s performance sections was the most fun part for us. The camera gives you half a 3D image which enabled us to have full control over their performance. This allowed us to do all the camera moves around them both as well make them dissolve, explode and even invert.”

Nap On The Bow credits:

Director / DoP Tim & Joe
Production company Colonel Blimp
Post production Chris Bristow @Munky London
Commissioner Nadja Rangel
Executive producer Tamsin Glasson