Filmmakers James George and Jonathan Minard have created an amazing new filmmaking technique for their on-going documentary project, Clouds. The process involves shooting interview subjects with standard DSLR cameras and a Kinect. After shooting, they took the 3D data points recorded by the Kinect and laid the video image of the person talking, recorded on the DSLR camera, on top of the 3D mesh creating a ghostly holographic effect.
“The goal behind the documentary is to capture the creative hacker ethos in a media that suits the subject,” explains George. “Clouds is a window into the mentality of the scene responsible for inventing the format that was used to create the film.” Which is probably why anyone who is familiar with the aesthetics of data visualization or has seen one of the countless Kinect hack demos from the past year will recognize influences of both in the film’s style. “The subjects float in a black void, their figures composed of tiny points connected by lines that flicker and break apart at the edges,” continues George. “They’re made out of pure computational matter—the same material the artists depicted work with on a daily basis.”
Clouds is among the most beautiful and haunting uses yet made of Kinect, and it should gall game developers everywhere that it took two filmmakers to do it.
[via The Creators Project]