All Your Cameras Belong to Us
When security professionals get together and talk video surveillance, topics generally range from Scalability and Video CODECS to Video Surveillance Architectures: Middleware Approaches to Smart Cameras.
One thing we’re pretty sure they don’t ever discuss is how to use closed circuit television to shoot a band’s first music video.
We’re not the first to tap this story, but we first heard the story today. And while we don’t claim to know all things about everything, we figure that if we haven’t heard about this perhaps you haven’t either.
The long and short of it: unsigned Manchester UK band The Get Out Clause wanted a music video for their new song, Paper. Their problem though was that they didn’t have the money to hire a camera crew to film it.
Looking around England and the 13 million CCTV cameras placed around the country, they got an idea. The surveillance state is their film crew.
So the band gathered their instruments and played on the street, in cabs, in buildings, in pretty much anywhere where a camera records the general going ons of day to day activity, 80 locations in all.
Then, under the Data Protection Act which basically allows the public to request surveillance footage that may have been take of them, they contacted the companies and organizations that operated the cameras to get the footage back.
From there, editing success.
Score one for the kids.
Michael Cervieri is Executive Producer of ScribeMedia.Org and an Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
great great great!
This is so cool. Truly innovative.