“Radiohead House of Cards” by ZOO Films
Conference:
- SIGGRAPH 2009 More animation videos from SIGGRAPH 2009:
Title:
- Radiohead House of Cards
Director(s):
Company / Institution / Agency:
- ZOO Films
Description:
Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video has garnered praise from fans and creative professionals alike for its first-ever laser-scanning capture and display technique.
The video set a couple of precedents. No traditional cameras or lights were used. Instead, two technologies were used to capture 3D images: geometric informatics and velodyne LIDAR. Geometric-informatics scanning systems produce structured light to capture animated 3D images at close proximity, while a velodyne LIDAR system uses multiple lasers to capture large environments such as landscapes.
In this video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360-degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes. It’s billed as being the first music video premiered by Google, which not only presented the completed video, but also published the datasets for people at home to make their own versions, which has spawned hundreds of user-generated homage videos (code.google.com/radiohead).
Visual effects supervisor Ben Grossmann helped to translate James Frost’s vision and overall aesthetic of the piece through the 3D datasets. Compositing supervisor Alex Henning worked to get the vaporization systems to blend with the data. CG technical director Rodrigo Teixera teamed with Frost and editor Wayman Harris to compose all the virtual cameras and animation in 3D. Adam Watkins was the CG supervisor who developed the pipeline for representing the datasets visually, and Magdalena Wolf was the visual effects producer who oversaw all aspects of the production.
Software:
Conforming was executed in Autodesk Flame with color via DaVinci
Additional Contributors:
Director: James Frost, ZOO Films
VFX & Post Facility: The Syndicate
Visual Effects Supervisor: Ben Grossmann
Compositing Supervisor: Alex Henning
CG Technical Director: Rodrigo Teixera
Editor: Wayman Harris
CG Supervisor: Adam Watkins
Visual Effects Producer: Magdalena Wolf
Production: ZOO Films
