Cameras? So 2007. Zoo Film's director James Frost talks tech trickery with Boards about the creative and challenges behind Radiohead's groundbreaking new video, which used nothing but scanners and lasers.

How did this video come about?

One of the things that came out of the conversations with Aaron Koblin, who worked on the Interpol "Rest My Chemistry" video, was that they were researching real time scanning techniques. That's when I said, "Whoa, hang on, you can scan somebody real time and make a 3D image in real time?" At the time I immediately said I can only think of one band on this planet that would take that kind of risk, and that was Radiohead.

Luckily I've known their managers for 10 years, so I had a direct line to them and I sent the idea back in December. Then I guess they showed it to Thom [Yorke, vocalist] and he really responded to it. Thom's really interested in technology and pushing boundaries, and he likes the idea of things being very generative and organic, computer-generated but real time.

He had some strong visions in his head - vaporization, a party scene - so that's where that started. I wrote a linear treatment, not being sure how we were going to make it work out. That was the fun [with] Radiohead; Thom and I were waiting for a phonecall to go ahead with the project and Thom said, "Well I guess we'll have to don our experimental caps, move forward and see what happens."

What's the technology behind the video?

We definitely pushed some of the technology to the limit. There were two systems. One was a geometric one that's still being developed by UCLA and Harvard on the east coast. There's a company in Boston who are basically doing all the research because they want to use it for emergency response, so if there's a house fire they can send an unmanned unit and because it picks up solid mass, rather than a camera, it can tell you what's there through smoke. It does have a very limited range, it can only scan images 1.4 meters in front of it. And it's very detailed; it basically records point cloud data, which is incredibly dense. That's what we used to shoot Thom.

The other system, the Lidar scanner, has been around longer; it was the first thing that was sent into the air after September 11th. They did scans of downtown to work out how high the rubble was and where the original foundations were. The data is less detailed, but still looks very detailed on the wider perspective. So we used that for the exteriors.

How does it all work?

It's 64 lasers that rotate 900 times per minute and record a million points of data each. It's pretty mad. For the scan of the city, the scanner has to be placed in a vertical position because it records in 90 degree slices. Then once we get the data together we have the freedom in the 3D world to come in and place the cameras. And you can go anywhere in the scene. That was the biggest mind fuck - you can scan something driving down the street yet go directly overhead, underneath it, anywhere you can. It was pretty freaky.