Way back in May of this year we wrote about the film Clouds, which featured a new, experimental filmmaking technique from the RGB+D team that used a Kinect and a DSLR camera to create a hybrid CGI and video form, marrying the two together. This technique takes the video footage from the SLR and maps it onto data captured with the Kinect depth-sensing camera, so you get strange-looking 3D visuals where forms become fragmented and erupt into point clouds or distort into meshes of lines.And now the RGB+D toolkit has been used to create a music video (hey, it had to happen eventually, music videos and the Kinect go together like the 1990s and badass kids’ cartoons) for Japanese band HaKU‘s track “Asterism”—which Wikipedia kindly informs me means "a pattern of stars recognized on Earth’s night sky." The piece was made by motion director Takcom (Takafumi Tsuchiya) and is quite probably the first music video to use the technique. Ah hang on, a quick Googling reveals that Jon Lindsay‘s track “Oceans More” (below) used the technique in a video that was released 3 weeks ago. So HaKU’s vid is quite probably the second ever.Rather than having the whole video in the RGB+D style, Takcom uses the software to add some visual ticks, from morphing the band into whitened digital entities to refracting them into virtual shadows of themselves, adding a touch of abstraction to the band’s performance.So do these two videos mean the RGB+D software will now become another tool to add to an animator’s arsenal, like After Effects, Cinema 4D, and Photoshop? We’ll have to wait and see, but it’s likely.Jon Lindsay's “Oceans More”@stewart23rd
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