Aug 6 2008

Radiohead House of Cards Data: Time Lapse Rendering in Real Legos

by Peter Kirn

When the creative team behind Radiohead’s new video for House of Cards released 3D imaging data of Tom Yorke’s head, I’m sure they looked forward to finding out what people would do with it. I’m guessing one thing they didn’t expect was for someone to go manually through the data and painstakingly reproduce it in actual, physical Legos, one … brick … at … a … time, then make it into motion again with time lapse photography (okay, with a fair bit of fakery and digital legos added, though quite nicely).

Be sure to go watch the high-quality version on YouTube for the full effect. (Check the direct YouTube link and look for the option directly below the player.)

I think I’m going to go just watch TV for the rest of the day or something.

creative-commons, data, legos, motion, oddities, photography, processing.org, radiohead, time-lapse, timelapse, videos, visualization, youtube,

massta

Oh my, that must of taken for ever. Was it a waste of time since it could of been much more procedurally done with 3D apps?
http://rpi.edu/~mcdonk/ Kyle McDonald

I'm guessing the closeups are physical and the rest is computational. The slow pans make me skeptical, along with the fact that there's some realistic compositing in his other videos.
http://createdigitalmusic.com Peter Kirn

Actually, I'm even more impressed that it's half-faked.

Of course, "taken forever" would probably still apply.

YouTube compressors covers nicely over anything you could see … hmm…
http://booyaa.org booyaa

best use of the data so far, there's been a lot of crap out there.
oscar

Very clever. Now that you mention it, that makes more sense than the outer edge "noise" is real, but the bulk of the animation is cleverly faked. Even funnier that he took the trouble to "mistakenly" insert his arm a couple of times around the 1:00 mark.
http://rpi.edu/~mcdonk/ Kyle McDonald

"YouTube compressors covers nicely over anything you could see … hmm…" — Yeah, I think this is the biggest point.

I remember there was a point where the 3D modeling community realized adding noise to their renders made them instantly look more "realistic" (i.e., more photographic) and everyone started doing that.
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