In the interactive documentary CLOUDS, content and form are one. A documentary focused on the creative coding community, CLOUDS exposes the beauty of computer code through 3D video.

The CLOUDS team places “hacker-artists” into the spotlight, in part to disprove the stereotype that code is purely functional. When the project is released in 2014, audience members will choose their own path through nearly 50 interviews with luminaries like Casey Reas; co-authors of Processing, Zach Lieberman, a co-founder of openframeworks; Fernanda Viégas of Google’s Big Picture Data Visualization research group; and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. CLOUDS co-authors James George and Jonathan Minard conceive of the interviews as an interconnected network that viewers can explore from any angle, pursuing a particular question across interview subjects, then rerouting their path with new questions of their own.

Minard and George capture CLOUDS‘ 3D footage with a video camera that they’ve built using commercially available parts, hacking together a Canon 5D with Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, originally marketed as part of the Xbox 360 video gaming console. The team also developed an open source software library, the RGBD toolkit, to read their 3D footage. The project has sparked an open source 3D filmmaking initiative, RGB+D.

Additional Resources:

Check out these clips, early versions, and additional materials for a deeper look into the CLOUDS project.

CLOUDS – Overview from Deepspeed media on Vimeo.

CLOUDS Teaser: Creativity from Deepspeed media on Vimeo.

CLOUDS Teaser: Simulation from Deepspeed media on Vimeo.

CLOUDS Teaser: Networks from Deepspeed media on Vimeo.

CLOUDS: Bruce Sterling Interview from James George on Vimeo.

CLOUDS: Beta, the first linear, non-interactive version of the project from 2012:

CLOUDS Kickstarter Page

RGBD Toolkit, the technology behind CLOUDS