this page, set up by Japanese TV station Wowow offers an interactive experience of a live Radiohead performance of their track “15 Step” during the group’s 2008 Japanese tour. It allows you to remix the video in real time using pixellized flash video streams captured from 12 different points-of-view, and to generate your own custom mix of the live performance.
Some people, I imagine, are paid to think up questions such as: “how can a live performance be adequately transferred to the internet that is not a pre-scripted video”, and, “how can you use the internet itself as an artistic medium?”. For possible answers to these questions check out what this site has to offer. (For another one, check out the band’s previous experiment in “Camera-less video creation”).
The basic premise here is to give the user control over which of the 12 different cameras / video streams recorded during a live Radiohead performance they would like to see, and to allow users to switch across these at will. More notes as follows:
- Two modes: viewing and switching. In switching mode the user’s changes from one camera to the other are preserved and re-played as they originally occured in the final edit.
Color coding: the cameras/views are color coded, which serves to generate a kind of rainbow by-product of the viewing experience.- Saving your edit: you can optionally register with the site and save your edit.
The verdict: this is just fun to play around with, especially if you’re a Radiohead fan like I am. The pixellization effect in particular is quite amazing and beautiful to see.
This reminds me of VJ apps like FreeFrame.
If you stop the video and wait few seconds, there will be better quality, but only for the moment – I didn’t find a way to load whole clip in higher resolution.