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Music

Miniature Tigers Go Astronautical with Their Video for "Crying in the Sunshine"

No one does lo-fi indie pop quite like this Phoenix band. Plus this vid utilizes Hololens—Microsoft's new augmented reality headset. #tech

On Miniature Tigers' wiki it says: "In December 2006, Rolling Stone listed Miniature Tigers as "one of the 25 best bands on Myspace."

Man. That makes me feel so nostalgic! Remember when MySpace was everything? Those were good times! Remember when Rolling Stone was everything! Probably not because you probably weren't born yet. Neither was I!

In any case, I first became obsessed with the Phoenix band back in 2010 when they dropped"Gold Skull" off their Fortress album—ostensibly The Beach Boys if there were raised on Atari. Their fifth album, I Wish I Was a Cowboy, is out on October 28th, and below is the premiere of their video for "Crying in the Sunshine." It's a fantastic slice of skippy indie-pop. The sort of song that'll make you feel better about Monday. The video meanwhile features an astronaut getting into all sorts: showering, roadtripping, drinking too much and passing out in the park. That kind of thing.

"We got the opportunity from Microsoft to test out their new augmented reality headset, the Hololens; which we used to shoot the whole video as it has a built in camera," explains one of the video's directors, Meghan Doherty. "Many of the effects and objects you see in the video are actually from an app within the headset called Actiongram, that has a gallery of 3D holograms that you can 'place' in your environment, so to speak.

"With this technology we built a story inspired by 'Crying in the Sunshine' around our hero, the astronaut. It was really fun and mind blowing to be able to 'place' this astronaut in the space with us, and shoot around him, just like using a live actor. It feels exciting and fresh to use a new tool to tell a story. It also felt like I was beamed in from the future running around Baltimore with this headset on. I got a lot of curious stares and a lot of questions. "

The other director, btw, happens to be Simply Sylvio, who is a gorilla Vine star! Yeah you read that right!