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Keepon Dancing to Spoon's "Don't You Evah"
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What can we say: there's something magical about a dancing robot. Keepon, a robot built and designed by Hideki Kozima, first appeared on YouTube in March with this video for Spoon's "I Turn My Camera On." In the clip created by robotics scientist and Keepon programmer Marek Michalowski, the simple Kyoto-based bot, composed of two yellow ballish shapes fused together, simply gets down and boogies for three-and-a-half minutes. The vid received more than 1.3 million views.
Now Keepon is back with another Spoon song, and another, more elaborate video commissioned by WIRED magazine. Scheduled to appear at WIRED's NextFest in LA in September, Keepon was asked to reteam with Spoon in Tokyo for a new video to be made under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license (for others to reuse and mash as they please).
"This all started with a research project (beatbots.org) in which we're developing technologies that allow robots to interact smoothly with people by synchronizing with the rhythms of our social behaviors," explains Michalowski, "and dance is a good place to begin."
Melanie Cornwell, WIRED's Editorial Projects Director, says in its nascent stages, the new video was originally going to be "like an homage to 'Lost in Translation,' with Spoon as Bill and Keepon as Scarlett, silly stuff like that," she explains. "Frankly, at the time, the video seemed a bit like bar talk. But then all the Wired planets aligned so perfectly— the band was into it, Keepon’s keepers were into it, and the timing was right."
Director Jeff Nichols was brought on to the project just after his debut feature Shotgun Stories had been making the rounds at film festivals. "Jeff lives in Austin, which is also Spoon’s hometown," explains Cornwell, "so Jeff’s talents and sensibility seemed like a great fit for the project." And along with Nichols came a team of collaborators: cinematographer Adam Stone, editor Chris Walldorf, and sophisticated CGI work from the guys at Edit at Joes.
"We communicated to Jeff that we wanted a video that began where Marek’s video left off," says Cornwell. "We always knew that we wanted the first shot to be a close-up of Keepon in the lab starting to dance. Where it would go from there was Jeff’s challenge. So he produced a couple of treatments that we ran by the band and the roboticists and tweaked until we had the perfect story.
"And to me," continues Cornwell, "the best part about that story is that it stars Hideki Kozima (the roboticist and child psychologist who designed and built Keepon) for his clinical research with autistic children."
Jeff Nichols/WIRED
Music Video
4:00
Tokyo
Keepon
Hideki Kozima
Jim Eno
Britt Daniel
Melanie Cornwell, Zana Woods
Jeff Nichols, Adam Stone, and Chris Walldorf
Adam Stone (Mortimer Jones)
Chris Walldorf (Mortimer Jones)
Executive Producers : Melanie Cornwell, Scott Dadich
Concept : M. Cornwell, Laura Eldeiry, Nancy Miller
Associate Producer : Ben Dickey (Constant Artists Management)
Graphics, Effects, Color Correction : Joey Beason, Joe Murray (Edit at Joes)
Tokyo Production Managers : Heath Cozens, Sawako Imai
Music (Spoon's "Don't You Evah") : J. Tepper, M. Tepper, D. Vockins
Keepon Wrangler/Programmer : Marek Michalowski
