Radiohead 'House of Cards' Interactive Remix

December 11. 2023

Description
Ever since I first saw Radiohead’s music video “House of Cards,” I’ve been obsessed with point cloud. In fact, that music video is the very reason I wanted to learn how to code in hopes that those skills could be used to help my film/video projects. Now approaching 17 years since its release, the video is still notable not only for its artistic direction but also for its use of lidar technology to create a unique visual representation of the song.

Thankfully, production process behind the video has been well-documented, and various data sets from the original video are publicly available.

The goal was to develop an interactive version of the House of Cards music video, enhancing the viewer's experience by allowing real-time interaction with the video’s 3D visual elements.

To capture live point cloud data, the team behind the video used costly equipment far out of reach from the average consumer. However, it was possible to get similar results using technology found in a consumer product. Even during the time of the video's production, this was accessible in the form of the Kinect sensor, bundled with the Xbox 360 gaming console.

By using the Processing programming environment, it was possible to capture a live point cloud feed—a 3D data representation of the scene—from the Kinect's lidar sensor. This was made feasible through publicly available code provided by Stanford University. To highlight the spatial dimension of the lidar data, a rotating camera was programmed to traverse the 3D environment, effectively creating a digital "mirror" of the physical world.

Furthermore, thanks to the availability of a point cloud sample provided by the creators of the original music video, it was possible to integrate this data into the interactive scene. By adapting the script from the original video, the point cloud data was successfully imported and synchronized with the music. After extensive refinement and troubleshooting, the result is an interactive music video that allows users to engage with the 3D visual elements in real time, offering a novel and immersive way to experience 'House of Cards'.

Ideally, this would be played as an installation in a gallery for others to play with, but I never got the opportunity to do so. In the end this ended up being a sort of distortion of the old music video in a way, I only wish there was more interaction to be done between the kinect and Thom Yorke (such as particle simulation).

Software Used
Processing 4.0
Premiere Pro
Adobe After Effects

Credit | Documentation
Stanford University
Radiohead