Elizabeth Rose Collaborates With Google Play On Interactive Music Video

Electronic producer Elizabeth Rose has unveiled an exciting collaboration with Google Play this morning, resulting in a playful new interactive video for her latest single, Playing With Fire featuring Remi.

Allowing fans to "play with her emotions" by slashing, tapping and twisting your mobile device as the music video plays (you can have a go on a desktop or laptop too, but you won't be experiencing it to its full capabilities), Elizabeth Rose and Google Australia's Sophie Hirst spoke exclusively to theMusic.com.au about the collaboration.

With the idea stemming from Elizabeth's enjoyment of fans remixing her songs, Elizabeth says, "We all met up and workshopped some ideas, especially the concept of letting fans into my music through an interactive video clip.

"The [tapping and spinning theme] is meant to be representative of what the song is about … so playing with my emotions and messing me about, it's really how the visuals interact with the meaning of the song. We used a lot of different concepts to correlate with the lyrics."

Hirst adds, "Mobile is a wonderful medium, and we loved the idea of a music video you can hold in your hands and actually play with. If you look at the history of music videos, they started as something you watched on MTV sitting in your lounge room. And together with Elizabeth and the Google team, we really loved the idea of technology giving you these new tools to take the art of music video and really push it to all these new places."

Technology-wise, the making of the video is quite complex in that it is built from "multiple layers of videos that are playing out in parallel on top of one another". 

Hirst explains, "It's coded so that parts of the video are transparent and other parts aren't, which allows the fan to interact and play with the video when they're all layered up on top of one another."

This isn't the first instance in which Google Play has collaborated with musicians, having worked with rockers Arcade Fire as well as The Presets. Hirst explains that championing Australian artists is crucial for Google Play in Australia.

"It doesn't just mean working with big established [Australian] artists that already have a huge fanbase and following, it also means helping to support these emerging artists, helping them break and get a foot in the door. 

"The idea of building something with an artist or musician from the very beginning and collaborating on the whole process, that was really fun for us, so I think we'd love to do more of these co-creation projects," says Hirst. 

You can check out Elizabeth Rose's interactive music video here.