Beck’s “Hello, Again” is an experiment from Lincoln Motor Company which utilized director Chris Milk and his team to create an immersive, interactive online experiment.
Screenwriter Joe Halstead, a member of FWD:labs, first found the music “one for the history books,” but then got on the website. “When the webcam kicked on… This is amazing… This is the future… Absolutely blown away by this. Completely stunning.”
What makes this project unique? Fast Company’s contributing writer Rae Ann Fera wrote “A New Vision For Sound”, where she interviewed director Chris Milk for a “masters class” in how they made it work:
- Binaural Recording
“[B]ecause I was recording the Beck performance with three 360-degree cameras, I needed the [binaural] heads facing in every direction simultaneously. I needed the sound recorded as if you were facing both towards and away from the musicians, in all 360 degrees, all at once. The solution was a head with ears all around its circumference. I assumed the solution already existed. It didn’t, so I had to invent it.” — Chris Milk, Director
- 360 Degree Cameras Without a Nadir/Zenith Hole
“Michael [Kintner]’s 360Heros system uses six GoPro cameras to record in every direction. Because of the way he places the support structure to hold the rig, he’s able to visually erase the support later as it lives between the paralaxing of two camera positions.” — Chris Milk
[See Cubify for a further article on this.]
- Facial Tracking Webcam Support
“We then wrote some code that pairs the bitmap data to the 360 footage, so when a user moves their head to the right within the webcam frame, we quickly detect that movement and the code tells the footage to move to the right based on a calculated speed.” — Zachary Richter, Stopp L.A.
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