Imogen Heap - Last Night Of An Empire - Mixed Reality Music Video
During my time with Volta, we were thrilled to collaborate with world-renowned musician and innovator Imogen Heap to create the official video for her single Last Night Of An Empire.
Volta had at that point been developing its AR capabilities, particularly by integrating Keijiro Takahashi's Rcam2 library, which allowed us to easily integrate a real camera feed from a LIDAR-equipped iPad with 3D objects and visuals generated in Unity, and be able to freely move the camera around the space.
True to her experimental and open spirit, Imogen decided that the recording of the video would also be live-streamed, meaning everything from the camera movment to AR visual effects and Imogen's choreography were repeated and refined over and over again and streamed to Youtube, whilst we searched for the perfect take.
Imogen's loyal legion of Heapsters provided encouragement and comment via the stream, and after just over three hours, the final take was in the bag. But it didn't end there - we also produced a standalone VR-only version of the video to be included as an archived performance inside of Volta.
Ahead of the recording at Imogen's barn studio space in Essex, I got to work creating visual elements in Houdini + Unity, and exposing parameters for on-set creative technologist Alexis Michallek to hook up to the Ableton session running the show so he could choreograph the AR visuals in time with the playback.
For the VR version, along with several new visual effects, I built several extensions to the Unity Timeline system to allow me to work quickly with the existing Volta setup and create a tightly synced experience (separate to the livestreamed video).
The VR video is unfortunately only available inside Volta VR, but you can catch a 2D recording of it here.