Believe it or not, A$AP Rocky is a huge fan of radiance fields.
Yesterday, when A$AP Rocky released the music video for Helicopter, many viewers focused on the chaos, the motion, and the unmistakable early MTV energy of the piece. What’s easier to miss, unless you know what you’re looking at, is that nearly every human performance in the video was captured volumetrically and rendered as dynamic splats.
I spoke with Evercoast , the team responsible for capturing the performances, as well as Chris Rutledge, the project’s CG Supervisor at Grin Machine , and Wilfred Driscoll of WildCapture and Fitsū.ai , to understand how Helicopter came together and why this project represents one of the most ambitious real world deployments of dynamic gaussian splatting in a major music release to date.
The decision to shoot Helicopter volumetrically wasn’t driven by technology for technology’s sake. According to the team, the director Dan Strait approached the project in July with a clear creative goal to capture human performance in a way that would allow radical freedom in post-production. This would have been either impractical or prohibitively expensive using conventional filming and VFX pipelines.
Chris told me he’d been tracking volumetric performance capture for years, fascinated by emerging techniques that could enable visuals that simply weren’t possible before. Two years ago, he began pitching the idea to directors in his circle, including Dan, as a “someday” workflow. When Dan came back this summer and said he wanted to use volumetric capture for the entire video, the proliferation of gaussian splatting enabled them to take it on.
The aesthetic leans heavily into kinetic motion. Dancers colliding, bodies suspended in midair, chaotic fight scenes, and performers interacting with props that later dissolve into something else entirely. Every punch, slam, pull-up, and fall you see was physically performed and captured in 3D.
Almost every human figure in the video, including Rocky himself, was recorded volumetrically using Evercoast’s system. It’s all real performance, preserved spatially.
This is not the first time that A$AP Rocky has featured a radiance field in one of his music videos. The 2023 music video for Shittin’ Me featured several NeRFs and even the GUI for Instant-NGP, which you can spot throughout the piece.
The primary shoot for Helicopter took place in August in Los Angeles. Evercoast deployed a 56 camera RGB-D array, synchronized across two Dell workstations. Performers were suspended from wires, hanging upside down, doing pull-ups on ceiling-mounted bars, swinging props, and performing stunts, all inside the capture volume.
Scenes that appear surreal in the final video were, in reality, grounded in very physical setups, such as wooden planks standing in for helicopter blades, real wire rigs, and real props. The volumetric data allowed those elements to be removed, recomposed, or entirely recontextualized later without losing the authenticity of the human motion.
... continue reading