New 3D Maccabees video!

Have you checked out the new Maccabees video yet? It's pretty impressive stuff, filmed as part of Vevo's Present series, this live session was recorded and rendered into a 3D world. For real.

We went down to the shoot, it looked more like a sci-fi film set up. A neon cross hatch design lit up the floor, while a small collection of selected fans stood wicker-man style around as the band drove through three tracks from their most recent album.

The video was filmed using a custom built rig of Xbox Kinects, which had been re-jigged by coder James Alliban. The video was directed by Jamie Roberts, who has worked on Belleruche and Glasvegas videos, along with his co-director Will Hanke. We have also been asked to give Head of Post, Jamie Child, and James Ballard a shout out too!

We sat down with Will Hanke for a chat about the project. Make sure to scroll to the end to check out the final video too.

Hi Will, is this a world first?
World first for ten Kinects – me and Jamie experiment a lot, we like to see this a continuing kind of experiment. It's important not to play it safe. Not to do something easy, those kind of 'acoustic sessions' seem to be saturated at the minute.

How long have you been working on this?
Over a month, building the rig, creating it, testing the camera angles. Tinkering with the Kinects over the past few years, this by far the most advance we've taken this style, we're moving the technology on quite a bit.



How did you develop the technique?
People in their bedrooms have been using the Kinect things in a DIY way for a couple of years, the development of this technology has been since then. We're not using pre-existing software, James Alliban has pretty much created this stuff form scratch. You can control (small) helicopters with these things. Seems to be an interesting area at the moment.

How do you think this will add to peoples experience of the music when watching online?
Part of it is to do with doing a live session which is exciting. There's not a lot of live sessions where people put this amount of creativity into it.

What else does the future of music videos hold do you think?
There's not a should go, me and Jamie are keen to see things develop in an interesting way. It's always nice when you see people do new things, there's always a possibility of something not working, but at least you tried it.

Any other techniques you're wanting to try out?
Yeah, definitely, me and Jamie are exited about the possibilities that have grown from this. looking forward to putting them into practice on other projects to be honest.

We'll keep an eye out for 'em!