Radiohead make their “House of Cards” video with lasers and no camera

Radiohead's video for “House of Cards”, from In Rainbows, is out today through Google, and not a frame of it was shot with a camera. James Frost directed it with two 3D scanning systems and no lights, and what appears on screen is a rendering of the points they measured, so Thom Yorke sings as a cloud of dots.

Geometric Informatics scanned people and objects at close range with structured light. The large outdoor scenes came from a Velodyne Lidar, a head of 64 lasers that spins through a full circle 900 times a minute.

The band have given the raw material away. The scan data, Yorke singing the song as points and the Lidar scans of the outdoor scenes, is on Google Code with Processing code by Aaron Koblin, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence, so anyone may use it to make a video of their own; the song and the finished film are not covered. Google's page also carries an interactive 3D version of the video that viewers can turn as it plays, and a making-of documentary accompanies the launch.

Yorke said in a statement that he likes using technology in ways it was not meant to be used. I liked the idea of making a video of human beings and real life and time without using any cameras, just lasers, so there are just mathematical points³, he said, and he was struck by how strangely emotional it ended up being³.