Enhanced Dimensions made history last week by launching Scotland’s first 3D Music Video. The video is for a song called “Gloria (The Death of Me)” by Edinburgh based indie band The Raw I’s. The video has been online less than a week, with no commercial promotion, yet has already raked up over 1000 views.
The 5 minute long 3D video can be viewed using red cyan 3d anaglyph glasses on:
YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/EnhancedDimensions)
Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/channels/stereoscopic3d#13514033)
The concept of the video is of a futuristic Hologram Projection Kiosk where a band performs – with the band depicted as projected holograms while the stage props, in this case guitar amps and drum kit, are solid objects. Imagine being able to buy your own little hologram theatre and watch your favourite band performing right on your desktop, that would be amazing. The concept was in part inspired by the memory of the Sega Holographic coin-op “Time Traveller” from the early 1990’s, and partly by the variations on the ”pepper ghost” illusion that is back in vogue being used at live events/theatres etc to project “holograms” in front of a live audience.
The video footage was shot using a single Sony HDR-FX 7 with the cast performing to the track in front of a greenscreen. The cast were then composited in a 3D environment created entirely within Adobe After Effects and the various shots and moves were generated with the stereoscopic effect controlled using a custom After Effects 3D rig. With this 3D rig, once the scene and general camera moves are created, the stereo effect can be increased or decreased in order to render versions suitable for a variety of screen sizes. The online version is created for a 23? Samsung Syncmaster – this version is therefore optimal for around a 20-26? screen.
The rendering was a massive task – each character has three animated tracking lights, plus every internal panel of the kiosk has a multi-layered animation continuously playing with certain effects syncronised to the drumbeat. All this is rendered using an off the shelf quad core PC with 4GB RAM. To make one change, e.g. changing the guitar amp design, would entail a week to re-render all the individual shots then another day to render the various final output 3d formats. All told the video has taken over six months to complete.
Creating the holographic look was key – it had to look a bit grungy with some harshness to suggest the technology wasn’t super smooth and that this existed in a real world environment. The fact that as you get closer the effect becomes more obvious, just as if you got too near a TV more and more artefacts become obvious really brings the look to life. Getting the hologram look right was a little like the recreating scene in Star Wars where R2-D projects Princess Leia… only not quite as sexy.
A very early clip of this was actually used in the short film “FourPlay” that won an InvaZion Award earlier this year – it’s quite interesting to contrast them now. The red cyan anaglyph version of the video can be viewed online however if you have suitable technology you can download the full HD version from the link below. A very early anaglyph version of this video that shows how far this has come will be available online soon.
source : www.enhanced-dimensions.com
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