2016 has been a landmark year for VR and 360° video. VR finally grew into its spatial self, with more and more artists coming out of the proverbial woodwork to produce groundbreaking roomscale experiences. In addition to the ever-increasing landscape of 360° camera options available for the consumer and professional alike, major social media outlets such as Facebook, YouTube, and WordPress have introduced 360° video hosting. Littlstar even developed solutions for 360° video playback on 2D TVs.
For the past three decades, the music video genre has been home to some of our freshest, most forward-looking visual media—and it’s arguable that the introduction of immersion is the single greatest change it has ever witnessed. In 2015, major artists like Bjork, Muse, and U2 took the dive into this new frontier. 2016 was a year for refinement and experimentation; with a few new lessons under their belts, immersive artists and musicians worked to produce projects that pushed the “music video” genre into something altogether new—ranging from 360° videos to interactive experiences—embracing each corner of the unique possibilities of immersive media.
Here are a few (of the many) we thought you should experience.
Reeps One – Does Not Exist
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It’s a shame more big name artists aren’t using their fame to drum up A-list budgets for immersive music videos like “Kids.” Early adopters and risk-takers tend to be independent artists who lack the resources to produce content with this degree of production design, casting, and choreography (note that this video is one take). The results speak for themselves. This is one of the downright prettiest 360° videos ever made (those colors!), and the level of theatricality has me thinking about possibilities that extend beyond music videos (like, say…West Side Story VR?).
Moses Sumney – Music from Every Angle for the 2016 Honda Civic (Original song: “Everlasting Sigh”)
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Framed as a “VR experiment,” Google’s app isn’t just a retreading of an iconic song, it’s an interactive journey through the subconscious of seminal frontman Freddie Mercury. And Google couldn’t have picked a more fitting source text; “Bohemian Rhapsody” is purportedly the first promotional music video ever created. The experience, available via Google Play, swirls ’70s era cartoon animation with repurposed stage footage and plenty of other cosmic imagery. And, embodying the unprecedented potential of VR, the piece is interactive; visual and audio elements are movement-responsive. In particular, the spatial audio lets you “step in” to the song and hear it like you never have before. So get your Wayne or Garth on and do the fandango.
Redfoo – Booty Man
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Forming a bit of a dream-team, pioneering VR adopter D∆WN (who led the first ever live 360° performance on YouTube) linked up with Los Angeles-based VR Playhouse to attempt a seemingly impossible feat: create an immersive video that could possibly match the visceral fervor of a song about unrestrained longing. Well, they did the impossible. To grasp D∆WN’s sheer depth of feeling, we’re taken into the far expanses of our minds, the universe, and everything in-between while tripped out colorscapes swirl over open space, leaving us as breathless when it ends as her voice when it begins.
Naive New Beaters – Heal Tomorrow (ft. Izia)
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Can anything stop this kid? Toronto’s latest and greatest up-and-comer sets his sights on VR and ends up with one of the coolest 360° videos of the year. By making a video that conjoins two of his songs, he’s also able to portray a complex portrait of identity by bridging two distinct moods and approaches that form a cohesive narrative. There are plenty of great scenes to mention, but seeing Jacuzzi tear it up while hanging all the way out of a moving vehicle as the video approaches its climactic shift (guess he does his own stunts too) has to be the highlight here.
Ball Park Music – Whipping Boy
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If there’s one thing Run The Jewels know, it’s that there’s a time for fun and a time to talk about the real shit. “Crown” situates itself in the latter camp as a bildungsroman that addresses notions of wealth, fame, and existential purpose. In order to portray the complex scenarios referenced in Mike and El’s verses, the Wevr produced, Peter Martin-directed 360° video plays out impressions of these narrative vignettes in black-and-white—a choice that simultaneously strips away distraction while subtly commenting on the nuanced nature of these issues.
Tyler Hurd – Old Friend (Song by Future Islands)
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There’s something to be said for clarity of vision; this video feels exactly like the song. Part sci-fi trip, part low-poly abstraction, 2DArray has crafted a bonafide phantasmagoria of a video. We start off in a “normal” room, but that’s just to give us a moment to gather ourselves for the beautiful chaos to come. We’re quickly channeled into the bright, mind-bending overload of peering into a dark night of the soul—and left to float inside that spiraling, euphoric mess.
Bengfang – Never Ends
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Cakes Da Killa is one of the most metamodern figures in contemporary music, and a firebrand to boot. He’s an openly gay rapper who channels equal parts lust, rage, and classicism in a way that only he can—and the results speak for themselves. Mark Lovato and Gella Zefira’s video manages to do the complex artist justice, taking cues from old-school German cinema to craft a menacing blast of retrofuturism that lingers long after you watch it.
EDEN – drugs
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Where “Pearl” differs from many mentions here is that it’s intended foremost as a narrative experience—but the song is the backbone of the story, and given how it drives the movement (couldn’t resist), it qualifies as a music experience as much as a narrative one. Few pieces of content in any medium could capture such a pure human story in such little space; we witness the trajectory of a father and daughter’s relationship over the course of her childhood into early adulthood, as depicted through the “lens” of a car. I don’t want to spoil the story, but I’ll say this much: be ready for a healthy tug on ye olde heartstrings.
Apex – Arjan van Meerten
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Source: VRscout