JJ Aucouturier - The Science of Nine Inch Nails

The Science of NIN

Temple University, Japan Campus, 2009
American Industrial Rock band Nine Inch Nails (NIN) has been experimenting with extremely innovative marketing techniques for their music. In January 2009, in an unprecedented move, the band leaked 450Gb of HD raw, unedited video footage from their Lights in The Sky tour, as a Bit-Torrent. "I'll bet some enterprising fans could assemble something pretty cool out of this", leader Trent Reznor wrote. Well, yeah, we did.
Joint work with: Hiroko Sumikura (Video editor, instructor, Temple University, Japan Campus) and a bunch of "enterprising" students

Phase I: (June-July 2009)

Downloaded footage, divided the task among the 7 students of "Advanced Non-linear editing" class (TUJ), and collectively assembled a complete DVD of the Lights in The Sky tour.

Phase II: (October 2009)

After realizing our 7 students/editors spontaneously combusted into die-hard NIN fans, started some serious consumer research about this: how different is it to actively edit a video compared to passively watching it on youTube? Got 30 subjects to edit 2 songs, and 30 others to simply watch the same songs, all filling the same questionnaire in the end, under properly controlled experimental conditions; data under analysis, coming soon.