Build the Cities

Raven Kwok describes this music video as “a code-based generative music video” programmed in Processing for the track Build the Cities by Karma Fields Featuring Kerli Kõiv.

Raven’s description:

The entire music video 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 depth sequence of the original footage. Speaking of the footage, a Kinect, a camera, plus Depthkit (depthkit.tv/) were used to shoot both the RGB and depth footage simultaneously. Since I was not using Depthkit’s built-in visualizer, an additional program was later developed to post-sync the two footage based on the milliseconds tags of the depth sequence.

For generating the cityscapes, 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 and read by the system the way similar as Kerli’s depth sequence. The mapping of the pattern is also affected by each host cubic cell’s “gravitation mode”, which changes the pattern’s facing direction.