Yeasayer - Glass of the Microscope

A music video moving between microscope footage, underwater dance, and volumetric recordings of Yeasayer.

Overlapping volumetric portrait — loop

The project

Glass of the Microscope is a 2013 music video for Yeasayer directed by Ruben van Leer. Filmed at Naturalis and Leiden University, it combines microscope footage, underwater dance, and Kinect-recorded performances to move between bodies, specimens, and data.

Production notes

I worked with Hectic Electric to film the RGB-D segments for the video, recording the band with the RGBDToolkit. Their performances break into point clouds and meshes inside Ruben's microscope imagery.

What others saw

“There’s a tension between analog and digital — as well as the scientific and the philosophical — throughout the new video, which layers film shot through microscopes with 3-D computer animation created using a Microsoft Kinect motion sensor camera. As objects preserved in jars merge with objects pressed between plates of glass beneath the microscope, human bodies dance through those same microscopic images.”

Glass of the Microscope

The finished video brings microscope footage, an underwater duet, and the band’s volumetric performances into the laboratory story.

Two offset volumetric views of a musician overlap in cream, teal, and magenta points against a dark field.

A singer holding a microphone appears as a fragmented volumetric scan, with teal and magenta point-cloud layers spreading behind him. — Volumetric performance frameStill from Yeasayer — Glass of the Microscope, directed by Ruben van Leer

My role

I worked with Hectic Electric to record the band's performances with RGBDToolkit. Those recordings appear as point clouds and meshes within the video's microscope imagery.

Selected credits

Ruben van Leer: Director
Alexander Porter: Kinect Recording / RGBDToolkit

What others saw

Glass of the Microscope

Selected credits

Links & presentations