Audio Video News

Radiohead made headlines months ago when they let fans determine how much they wanted to pay to download Radiohead's latest album In Rainbows. They're pushing the limits again. The music video for a song off that same album, "House of Cards" is pretty unconventional too.

Instead of using cameras, the music video was shot using lasers.  Calm down - no rock stars were injured in the creation of this video. Using new multimedia technologies from Geometric Informatics and Velodyne Lidar, a laser scanning image was used to capture the live action.

The video, produced by James Frost, isn't out yet, but we can't wait to see it. Here's how it was produced.

From a press release about the project: "The Geometric Informatics scanning system employs structured light to capture detailed 3D images at close proximity, and was used to render the performances of Radiohead's Thom Yorke, the female lead, and several partygoers. The Velodyne Lidar system uses multiple lasers to capture large environments in 3D, in this case 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute, capturing all of the exterior scenes and wide party shots."

Thom Yorke said, "I always like the idea of using technology in a way that it wasn't meant to be used, the struggle to get your head round what you can do with it. I liked the idea of making a video of human beings and real life and time without using any cameras, just lasers, so there are just mathematical points - and how strangely emotional it ended up being."

Doesn't it seem that music videos are always the first to introduce new techniques?  Let's hope they were profitable enough from the sale of the album to continue pushing the envelope. -Leslie Shapiro

See CNN's interview with Frost here