The Standard Hotel in New York recently paid artist and Demolition Man director Marco Brambilla and Crush studio to make this video (called “Civilization”) to play in the viewport of their elevators.  It’s based on Dante’s Inferno and uses more than 400 video sources.

We began with exploring the idea of using a game engine to house the project. Seemed easy, map footage onto planes in space, attach a PC to the elevator and we can move up and down in the game environment all day. Unfortunately, once we started to collage the clips together in the Flame we knew the game engine idea wouldn’t fly.

We approximated that we would have 250 looped HD clips in the environment and our Flame could barely handle it (in the end it was closer to 500 looping clips). We compromised by locking ourselves into the idea that we would create a huge vertical canvas that we would scan up and down on once the elevator was in motion. The final piece was approximately 1920 x 7500 pixels.

Haha, “Flame”. He tried to use a gay computer. Seriously though, I have no idea what any of that meant, but the video looks cool. When it comes down to it, I really don’t know how anything works. If civilization ever broke down I’d probably end up eating grass and trying to kill squirrels with my own poop.

[via Vulture, Motionographer]