We are never ever getting back together.
It’s been a big week for Taylor Swift: besides dumping Spotify, her album 1989 scored more sales in its debut week than any album since 2002 (when Eminem released The Eminem Show). Now, she’s hinting at the future of music videos.
On Monday, the music video for the country singer-turned-pop music maker’s track “Blank Space” leaked. Set on the immaculately manicured grounds of a countryside mansion fit for a Vogue photo shoot, the video follows a ball gown-wearing Swift in shot after shot as she romances, and then terrorizes, a handsome (and unsuspecting) man. By all accounts, it’s a glossy, theatrical, traditional kind of music video—except that along with it, Swift is launching an app that gives fans access to an immersive, interactive version of the video. The app (available for iOS and Android) turns the mansion and its grounds into a videogame-like setting that the player can enter and explore at her whim.
Director Joseph Kahn filmed the video and the app with a camera that has six lenses to produce the 360-degree viewing experience. The app leverages the accelerometers in phones and tablets, so while inside it you can tilt the app side to side, or even up towards the ceiling, to see different views of the house’s six different rooms. Each room gets its own choreographed narrative: Taylor and her man walk (or dance, or fight) in each room for certain intervals, and if you were to linger behind, ancillary characters like a butler, or a portrait painter, will pop up and start sneaking bites of food or adding some color to a painting. There are also some 40 easter eggs scattered about to be discovered, including things like Polaroids snapped by Ms. Swift herself. Taken together the app simulates an experience that’s part Google Street View, and part Sleep No More, the immersive theater version of Macbeth.
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