Beck’s incredible video for David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision,” previously mentioned by mxdwn here, has made a huge splash online.
Over the past week the Chris Milk-produced video has been seen over 300,000 times, which should come as no surprise when considering just how innovative it is. The video, which features Beck surrounded by a 160-piece musical ensemble, gives viewers a 360-degree interactive view of the live performance, allowing one to change the angle of the camera in much the way images from Google Maps can be changed. Moving the image, moreover, changes the audio, giving the listener a sense of what the music sounded like from that particular angle. To achieve this, Milk had to not only find the right 360-degree camera set up (after consulting Google he went with their 360 Heros rig, which connects 6 cameras at a time, thus eliminating blind spots), but he even had to invent a whole new method to capture sound. With the help of Alan Scott from the creature and costume group Legacy Effects, he devised a multi-axis head that provides the most realistic experience possible. This new approach to sound was so effective, in fact, that Milk now has a patent pending on it. Experience the video for yourself here.