MUSE captured in 4D Gaussian Splat, reborn as light
For Nightshift Superstar, MUSE wanted the video to live in particles and light without losing what matters most: the band's real performance. Radiant Images captured them with Meridian 4D, and with processing partner Gracia.ai rebuilt the takes as 4D Gaussian Splats: real performances the camera can fly through, dissolve into particles, and re-form as light.
What is at stake
A music video is the song's visual identity, and for a band like MUSE the creative ambition runs ahead of what a camera can do. The concept called for the performance to scatter into particles, become traces of light, and be seen from a camera moving freely through the scene.
Every conventional route to that look costs the same thing: the performance itself. The moment the band is replaced by a digital double or a generated frame, it stops being them.
The performance. Fans know when it is not really the band. The energy of a live take, played together in a room, was non-negotiable.
The vision. Particles, dissolves, and light traces that go beyond what conventional CG naturally delivers, without looking synthetic.
The camera. The concept demanded moves through the middle of a live take, on paths no physical camera could travel without being in the shot.
The challenge
The standard toolkit offers two trades, and both are bad ones. Build the band in CG and every frame is a model of the performance rather than the performance: real nuance is hand-animated back in, and it shows.
Generate the imagery with AI and it is not the band at all. And the volumetric stages that could capture the real thing are fixed installations with a locked volume, built for a studio floor, not for a music video's sets, blocking, and schedule.
CG replaces the performance. A digital double is an interpretation. The subtlety that makes a take feel alive is exactly what gets lost in translation.
AI is not the band. Generated frames may look spectacular, but nothing in them was ever performed. Authenticity was the brief.
Fixed stages do not fit a shoot. A locked capture volume cannot reshape to each scene's size, blocking, and camera distance the way a production needs it to.
The Radiant approach
Meridian 4D made the stage fit the shoot instead of the other way around: 14 untethered nodes carrying 56 synchronized iPhones reconfigured into different shapes, sizes, and distances for each setup. The band performed live inside the array, and every camera recorded 4K open-gate ProRes RAW at 60 fps in the same instant. Nothing is generated: every frame of the band is the band.
The schedule proved the system. MUSE came in the day after the array returned from the PGA Championship live broadcast: the stage was rebuilt overnight and set up by the next morning, ready to shoot. A music video runs on the director's and the band's time, and a fully deployable stage is what makes that turnaround efficient and cost effective.
This is what Gaussians unlock. Radiant's processing partner Gracia.ai rebuilt each take into a 4D Gaussian Splat: the performance stored as millions of points of light in space and time, so the video's visual language comes from the capture itself. The real performance can be scattered into particles, stretched into traces of light, re-formed, and retimed, and a virtual camera can fly through the middle of the take on paths no dolly could travel. It is manipulation beyond CG and beyond AI, because nothing is synthetic: it is the band, rearranged as light.
The system
The integration
The capture
The impact
The particles and traces of light the band asked for were built from the performance itself, not painted over it. The look is the capture, which is why it does not read as CG.
It is really the band, playing together, in every shot. The 4D Gaussian Splat preserves the take exactly as it happened, no matter how far the camera or the particles push it.
Camera moves are chosen after the take, not before it: through the scene, around the performance, at any speed. Blocking a shot stops being a bet placed before the moment happens.
The captured performance outlives the video: a navigable 4D record ready for future content, visuals, and experiences without calling the band back to set.
Beyond the music video
This technology is more accessible, and easier to deploy, than ever before.
The MUSE shoot is the proof. The stage landed from a live broadcast at the PGA Championship one day, was rebuilt overnight, and was capturing a band the next morning. No construction, no fixed facility, no weeks of prep: a fully deployable stage that flexes to the director's and the artist's time and vision is what makes 4D production efficient and cost effective.
That accessibility opens the technology to everyone: concert visuals and tour content built from the band's own performance, a growing 4D archive of an artist's career, and past music entirely, film and episodic VFX, fashion, sport, and brand work. Wherever the creative wants to bend reality without replacing it, a real 4D capture delivers what no generated frame can, because it actually happened.
Bend the moment, keep it real
If your creative pushes past what a physical camera can do, Radiant Images can capture the real performance in 4D and hand you a scene you can direct forever.