Lo-fi quintet Echo Park bash, crash and wail in the music video for "Young Silence." While the rave-up sounds radiate anarchic charm, the cool visuals -- which were created using a hacked Microsoft Kinect -- made the clip a viral hit in England.
Band members appear as squiggly forms on-screen thanks to the ingenious motion-capture technique used by director Dan Nixon, who modded a Kinect controller to shoot the musicians in action.
On his blog, Nixon describes the method he used to transform live-action Echo Lake players into digitized versions of themselves.
"The band was recorded separately by the Kinect plugged into a MacBook Pro," he writes. "The laptop was running a piece of custom software written in Cinder by my friend and colleague Dom Jones that wrote out the depth and RGB images to separate 'TIFF stacks.' Once we'd shot the footage I began to build on the work of Flight 404 (who wrote the original Kinect drivers for Cinder) to manipulate the images into one 'world.'"
The unusual source code for "Young Silence" qualifies the short for a screening at San Francisco's Disposable Film Festival. Running Thursday through Sunday, the fest champions shorts shot on camera phones, disposable devices, flatbed scanners -- pretty much anything except conventional moviemaking gear.
Highlights include a Saturday night seminar/performance by YouTube-famous music duo Pomplamoose, with Cowboys & Aliens writer Hawk Ostby, Vimeo exec Andrea Allen, indie producer Ted Hope, Philadelphia experimental filmmaker Christopher McManus (Hair and Diamonds) and other guests slated to make appearances.
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