Build the Cities
Music video for Karma Fields + Kerli put together by the talented Raven Kwok utilises Kinect captured data and combined it generative art programmed with Processing:
The entire piece consists of multiple stages. The basic structure for each stage is a dynamic subdivided cubic cell, which is able to multiply based on a designated distribution pattern.
For generating the animated singing figure (Kerli), the pattern is computed based on the depth sequence of the original footage. Speaking of the footage, a Kinect, a camera, plus RGBDToolkit (rgbdtoolkit.com/) were used to shoot both the RGB and depth footage simultaneously. Later I wrote a program to post-sync the two sequence based on the milliseconds tags, since I was not using its built-in visualizer.
For generating the city scapes, I programmed another separate generator to produce images of random aerial views of buildings, using brightness to indicate each block’s altitude. The images were later imported into the system similar as depth sequence. The mapping of the pattern is also affected by the host cell’s “gravitation mode”, which changes its facing direction.
The entire music video is programmed and generated using Processing, with a few slight radiant blur effects done in Premiere.
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