WITH THE RISE of virtual reality—and the simultaneous spike in VR-related #content—there’s been a surge of music videos that try to capitalize on the added immersion. Run the Jewels went stark; the Icky Blossoms went CGI trippy; Canadian rapper Jazz Cartier cloned himself. And now, Dawn Richard (aka D∆wn) has thrown all three approaches into a 2035-era Vitamix and poured out an intergalactic smoothie.

When the video for “Not Above That” opens, you’re on a small spherical ship, blasting off into the cosmos as Richard sings the opening bars. Look down, and you can see the probe’s jets firing and the planetscape falling away; look anywhere else and you get an all-encompassing panorama of the final frontier. As the song unfolds, so do the visuals—from Richard herself appearing as a small embedded monitor on the ship’s interior, to dance sequences featuring holograms, to flying through a wormhole and past otherworldly structures. It’s four and a half minutes of anything-goes space capades. “Instead of just shooting people in 360, we wanted to make you feel presence in another dimension,” Richard says. “Instead of a VR piece that’s just images, we want to add storytelling to that platform.”

It’s not the first time the singer has tried to push things past where they currently stand. Once a member of Sean Combs-assembled R&B girl group Danity Kane (shout out to Making the Band 3!), Richard reinvented herself as a fiercely independent, self-financed solo act. Over the course of a handful of EPs and albums, she blurred genre lines both musical and literary, exploring fantasy and sci-fi themes while pulling in influences from ’80s pop to ambient. And increasingly, as her music became more digitally influenced (“Not Above That” hit Number One on the iTunes “electronic” chart when it was released in January), so did her visual thinking: in April, she headlined YouTube’s first-ever Live 360 performance livestream.

Overcoming VR’s Strange Obstacles

Yet, the obstacles of 360-degree video rankled her from the beginning. “There were so many errors just trying to get rid of the seams,” she says. So along with her director, Monty Marsh, Richard began to look for a creative partner that could help them realize their vision of a VR experience that went not just beyond video, but beyond real-life situations. And they found it in a converted liquor store in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhood.

That’s where production company VR Playhouse is headquartered; their servers and rendering farm are housed in the store’s refrigerated cooler display. The startup had created a number of projects, from live concerts to nature documentaries, but despite having experienced animators in-house the company had never worked on a fully CGI experience. “We had just come off of an enormous project that had been very challenging for the staff, and I’d been wanting to have them do something fun,” says CEO and co-founder Christina Heller.

Marsh sent the VR Playhouse team a treatment for a 2-D video they had planned for the song; in it, viewers are transported from an intimate live performance through Richard’s third eye and into a concert on a spaceship. “We start from a place of story and work our way out,” Marsh says. “Technology changes, the way we interact changes, but the way we get in is always story.” They wanted a VR video, Richard says, that would expand that vision even more.

And, as they say in Hollywood, they sold it in the room. “We saw a bunch of nerds get excited,” Richard says, laughing. “They had only been working on video—they hadn’t been creating media and planets and choreography!”

“By the end of the meeting,” Heller says. “our creative director actually stood up and said, ‘Let’s make some VR!’”

Rethinking the Music Video

They moved fast—hyperspeed, by VR standards. Marsh shot the dance sequences and a small number of close-up performances in a single day, on a green screen. (A second day of shooting took care of the 2-D video, which will be released later.) As with many people creating for virtual reality, Richard and Marsh realized that the rules they were used to didn’t apply anymore. For one, how do you create choreography for a VR environment and its effectively lower pixel density? “We had to get away from fluidity and do sharper movements so that people could read the timing,” Richard says. “Everything has to be way more aggressive: pivots, full turns, shoulder movements, things that were super big.” Styling, hair, even makeup had to be rethought for the constraints of VR.

After the capture, VR Playhouse got busy with the CGI part. Thankfully, that “enormous project” they’d just finished for a client had left them with an equally enormous rendering machine; after 3D animators would finish a pass, they’d render the video overnight. And the enthusiasm continued to build. “At first it was something we thought we’d do in our spare time, but people got so excited about the piece that it kind of took over the studio,” Heller says. After a month of constant communication between Richard and Marsh and the production house, they had a finished product.

“In every project that we take on, there’s either been huge technical barriers that had to be overcome in a short timeframe, or new workflows that had to be invented,” Heller says. “This was a really joyful process—you wish all things could be that effortless and simple.” Meanwhile, Richard is already off and running; she’s touring Europe, lightyears away from where her video takes you.

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