The North Country
Some of the best musicians I know comprise The North Country, a band that originated in DC but is now spread across three cities along the East Coast. I still consider them DC artists, having emerged from parallel cultural scenes in the city. I reached out to Andrew Grossman in the winter of 2022, asking if I could make a VR music video for any upcoming albums—I had been playing around with a lot of immersive media technology at the time and thought it would be a nice experiment to take a depth camera, capture a band, and have the viewer be inside the video, rather than looking at it through a screen.
The first year of the project was pure experimentation. I had filmed the band with three depth cameras at a time as individuals, hoping to animate them in post. After months of attempts that ended horrible frame rate drops in VR due in part to the high amount of data while using multiple video feeds, I decided it needed to be reshot. About a year after my initial proposal, the band and I got together and shot the video throughout my house in one take. We choreographed stations for each band member to run to after I turned the camera away from them. As musicians, they have impeccable timing, so after just four takes we decided we had what we needed.
After another year, I was able to animate the footage in Unity, primarily using a particle system generator called VFX graph to control the voxels of the depth footage. In addition, elemnts like transforms, scaling and rotations were animated using traditional keyframing, and the audio of almost every track was piped through the particle system to influence factors like size, opacity and simulated forces. As a whole, the video is a combination of traditional, digital, and emerging film making and animation techniques.
A 2D video cannot do it all justice, though visually striking, there is a completely different absorption of the video as an experience.