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Music

Fly Through a Virtual Planet in 360° Music Video [Premiere]

Cy Tone creates a “pluri-dimensional planet” almost entirely submerged in water for Niagara's "Hyperocean" music video.
Images courtesy the artist

The Italian based-duo Niagara are returning with their album, Hyperocean, on April 29. It’s a mix of the pop and experimental electronic, funk and darker-hued psychedelia. And like 2014’s Don’t Take It Personally, which focused on the friction between technology and nature, Hyperocean is conceptual—it’s about a “pluri-dimensional planet” almost entirely submerged in water.

To elaborate on this concept visually, Niagara’s David Tomat and Gabriele Ottino brought in filmmaker and video artist Cy Tone, who gives this virtual planet an interactive 360° look for the album's title track. Viewers fly along the ocean, taking in the planet’s mirror-like surface and mountains, while alphanumerics hang in the atmosphere. Cy Tone also takes viewers up into the sky, and drops fleeting bits of colorful glitch to play with the artificiality of VR and 360°.

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“Water is the element from which Niagara started as a project, and so we felt the need to go back there to our beginning, to what really inspired us emotionally,” Tomat and Ottino explain. “Hyperocean is a pluri-dimensional planet almost completely covered in water. It changes continuously, reacting with whoever is visiting it by switching from one number of dimensions to another.”

Cy Tone used the scenery generator software Terregan to create the entire planet, which is filled with mountains, hills, plains, lakes and oceans. He also used it to give the planet atmospheric variations, solar light and other visual components.

“When Niagara asked me to build a planet for their new album, I made one drown in a vast ocean, with only a few islands and a salt desert,” Cy Tone tells The Creators Project. “Located on an archipelago of small islands, Hyperocean's video is a travel on the planet from dawn to sunset.”

“Thanks to the highly customizability of Terragen, we’ve edited the islands high and turned them into mountains,” he adds. “Then, taking advantage of some ‘glitches’ of the program, such as the weird possibility to travel inside the mountains, we found a way to give rhythm to the travel.”

After a few months of work, which included a long phase of frame and render production, Cy Tone sent the frames to Niagara. With 2001: A Space Odyssey in mind, Ottino began manipulating each frame, turning the virtual trip into a psychedelic experience.

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“Niagara’s aim was to create a world where our idea of reality is just one of the many different ones that shape Hyperocean,” Cy Tone says. “So, sometimes between the interferences that populate the video, you can see a ‘real’ ocean take the place of the ‘virtual’ one.”

“At every turn the record is sonically considered,” Tomat and Ottino add. “Not only in concept, water also plays a central role in the production of the album, featuring hydrophone-recorded samples that help shape their ‘imaginary world made of water.'"

Explore Hyperocean below:

Hyperocean is out April 29 on Monotreme Records. Click here to see more of Cy Tone’s work.

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