Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film The Shining is one that some viewers have seen so many times that its principal location, a haunted Colorado hotel called The Overlook, is practically a second home. Kubrick’s camera spends a good deal of time prowling The Overlook’s weirdly carpeted hallways and exploring its seemingly infinite rooms, making the isolated mountaintop resort seem eerily real and all-encompassing. Many a nightmare has been set in The Gold Room, The Colorado Lounge, or the infamous Room 237. Die-hard fans of the film must wonder what it might be like to explore this famous and foreboding space on their own. An experimental 30-minute video called “Shining 360” offers some clues. Spoiler: It’s pretty damned disturbing, even without “Dies Irae” on the soundtrack.
The video, which uses YouTube’s still-novel 360-degree feature, is the work of digital artist Claire Hentschker, who has used the process of photogrammetry to create a virtual map of the film’s sets. The images are taken directly from the movie, but they’ve been spread out spatially so as to simulate the physical distance that would exist between objects in a three-dimensional environment. Anything not directly captured by the camera is rendered here as inky blackness. Therefore, depending on where the viewer is looking, the world of “Shining360” sometimes looks like it’s melting or disintegrating.
Hentschker’s video is surreal and disorienting at every turn, but viewers who are very familiar with The Shining should be able to find their bearings somewhat easily here. The video is arranged chronologically to match the order of the film, and the camera movements are imported directly from Kubrick as well. Therefore, just like The Shining, “Shining360” begins with a journey through the twisty mountain roads leading to the hotel, and it ends with the snow-covered hedge maze, plus a brief coda in The Gold Room. Along the way, viewers can poke around in The Overlook’s overwhelmingly large kitchen, the Torrance’s cozy apartment, Stuart Ullman’s office, and even the freezer and storage lockers. Fortunately, the original movie provides plenty of visual information for this digital simulacrum. It’s important to remember that The Overlook is known for driving its inhabitants to madness, so viewers may want to keep that in mind before devoting a good chunk of their day to staring at “Shining360.”
[via Laughing Squid]