• Duologue + Jean Abreu
  • Entertainment
  • Film & Production

A film that puts the fans in charge

London-based band Duologue is renowned for music that travels through multiple emotions in a single song. Moving Brands was approached by the band’s management company, Everybody’s, to help create something distinct (and interactive) for the single ‘Machine Stop’. We built a web experience that gave fans unprecedented control of the band's performance, which we then transformed into a 3D music video which truly deserves to be called ‘interactive’.

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“Machine Stop is about weird digital-driven relationships, it totally made sense to us to do something that reflects that in the video. We’re genuinely excited to see our fans’ reaction to it.”

Duologue

A film to embody the lyrics
We began with the lyrics of ‘Machine Stop’, which speak of confused vision and lack of sight: “Is it you?/Is it me?/Everywhere I look but I just can't see”. The band members, along with renowned choreographer and performer Jean Abreu appear in the film, embodying the lyrics as powerful, mechanistic, data silhouettes.

Hardware and software by Moving Brands
“Try and get control of yourself” says the lyric – and our approach was to create a work where the fans were in charge. We shot in 3D, using our own purpose-built hardware (for instance, we made a caddy to hold the Kinect cameras steady) and customised software (to make a ‘depth map’ and convert data into a 3D space). The interactive web experience we created allowed fans to manipulate the ‘characters’, alter angles and depth, and control the colour balance of the monochromatic film.

One film. 1.5 billion lines of data
We invented an end-to-end system to meet the challenge of filming, editing and hosting a film created from over 1.5 billion lines of raw data. The result was a world-first Kinect-hacking, browser-pushing 3D interactive music video, with nearly 23,000 views on YouTube.

Our pioneering approach has been recognised by Google, with the project featured on their Chrome Experiments site – a showcase of the world’s most creative web experiments. The site has also won the FWA Site of The Day award.