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Fans come on stage in Azealia Banks’ new interactive video, built on Google Cloud Platform
Friday, March 13, 2015
Today’s guest blog comes from Brett Renfer, Director of Experience Design, at
COLLINS
, a New York City-based brand consultancy that uses design thinking and convergence of design, music, film, and technology to create unforgettable brand experiences.
When we discussed plans for Azealia Banks’ new video, “Wallace,” we knew we had to do something as innovative as she is – something that allowed her to make a big splash and give her fans, eager to see her new work, an experience that only Azealia could introduce. Believing in the power of converging music, film, technology and design, we challenged ourselves to create a
first-of-its-kind interactive music video
for Azealia. The video would bring Azealia’s fans on stage with her by empowering the video version of Azealia to mirror their movements in real-time. We knew that if we could pull this off, fans could watch the video from anywhere and feel like Azealia stood directly in front of them, singing not just to them, but with them. Our Executive Creative Director, Lee Maschmeyer, asked us to push beyond what we now think is possible, and we did.
We watched dozens of music videos as we dove into development, and could not find another music video that manipulates actual video files and pixels, in the way that we aimed to. We built a unique app that combined WebGL, HTML5 video, and web camera interaction. By building the app on
Google Cloud Platform
, we were able to focus on creating this unique design and experience rather than on engineering and optimization, and could do so quickly with a very small team.
The COLLINS development team consisted of two developers, one in New York and one in Texas. We started prototyping the app in Chrome, and then pulled everything into
Google App Engine
to continue prototyping on local web servers. This allowed us to test locally, quickly deploy live, and share with collaborators around the globe. We built the entire app in just two months. Given Azealia’s huge fan base, we anticipated that we’d need to use App Engine to scale without any additional work on our end.
We learned that we could handle really high-resolution video and high quality sound in WebGL in Chrome, but needed some seriously powerful content hosting that provided a high level of configurability.
Google Cloud Storage
turned out to be the perfect fit; by using Cloud Storage, we could deliver high-quality content out to all users – including those who used up to 300 MB bandwidth – and load and manipulate that content in WebGL.
Azealia’s creative input throughout the process was invaluable. She’s a huge fan of technology and looks for ways to interact and engage more closely with her fans. She worked closely with us from start to finish to make sure that the video experience embodies her unique artistry.
As a creative company, we’re known for powerful storytelling, and our team did a remarkable job finding the emotional heart of Azealia’s song and leveraging Google technology to make it uncommonly real and responsive.
See the
full story
behind how our small team with a big idea brings Azealia closer to her fans.
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