The North Country
Some of the best musicians I know comprise The North Country, a band that originated in DC but is now spread across three cities along the East Coast. I still consider them DC artists, having emerged from parallel cultural scenes in the city. I reached out to Andrew Grossman in the winter of 2022, asking if I could make a VR music video for any upcoming albums—I had begun playing around with a lot more immersive technology at the time and thought it would be a nice experiment to take a depth camera, capture a band, and have the viewer watch from inside the video, rather than looking at it through a screen.
We filmed some takes at the start of summer, but given the experimental approach, things moved slow. Many takes were shot with multiple cameras, but this proved to be too heavy a lift for Unity to handle. After over half a year of failed experiments trying to edit in post, the band and I got back together and reshot the video using one camera, in one shot. As musicians, the band members have impeccable timing, so we were able to coordinate their movement throughout the set without having to make any cuts. On the fourth take, we had the footage we needed.
After another year, I was able to animate the footage in Unity, primarily using a particle system generator called VFX graph to control the voxels of the depth footage. In addition, elements like transforms, scaling and rotations were animated using traditional keyframing, and the audio of almost every track was piped through the particle system to influence factors like size, opacity and simulated forces. As a whole, the video is a combination of traditional, digital, and emerging film making and animation techniques.
The video premiered alongside a concert by the band and ViRG with live laser art by Zak Forrest on March 29th, 2024 at Culture House DC.
With three alumns involved in the project, and the support of its Immersive Media Design Department, the University of Maryland put together a writeup and a video profile on the piece.