Castle of Glass(official video)

The official video track of "Castle of glass" is out. Castle of Glass video is presented by Linkin Park in association with EA Games. for their latest release "Medal of Honor: War-fighter"

Watch the official release of video right here on "LPLI":

Lost In The Echo Official Interactive Video

Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oTlSwvZ0C8&feature=channel&list=UL


No member of Linkin Park appears in the band’s new video, but some of your closest friends can get some prime screen time with the simple click of a button.

The video for “Lost in the Echo,” a “personalized film experience” that pulls in images from Facebook to weave your loved ones into its post-apocalyptic storyline, is slated to go live Wednesday at 11 a.m. Pacific on the Lost in the Echo website.

“We’re trying to make it about the story, rather than just pulling in the novelty or the gimmick of these Facebook photos,” said the video’s co-director Jason Nickel in a phone interview with Wired. “We’re trying to tie your personal life into the actual story, so that it’s logical and it seems like it was actually created for you rather than kind of shoehorned in there just because we could do it.”

The atmospheric music video is part of a swelling stream of “interactive” projects that tap Facebook Connect and other datasets to power a new sort of storytelling. By blending personal data with traditional imagery, “Lost in the Echo” seamlessly injects the viewer into the video — with results that are sometimes surprising.

Unlike some previous interactive projects, there’s no tedious uploading or cropping of images — everything takes place in the background once the viewer links their Facebook account to the video.

“We talked about doing a few different interactive ideas, but in the end, we’ve always liked the idea of just having the user click a button and they are off viewing the experience with minimal interaction,” Nickel said.

Nickel and creative partner Jason Zada explored similar territory with their award-winning interactive horror short Take This Lollipop, which used Facebook Connect to make it look like the viewer was being stalked by a sweaty creep wearing a wife-beater. (Zada is currently seeking funding for a Take This Lollipop sequel on Kickstarter.)

For the Linkin Park video, Zada and Nickel worked closely with Mike Shinoda, the rapper/multi-instrumentalist who writes many of the Southern California rap/rock band’s songs. The group wanted a video that would make a personal connection with its 44 million Facebook fans while also augmenting the theme of the latest Linkin Park record, Living Things.

“This album ended up being very much about ‘you’ and ‘me,’” Shinoda told Wired by phone, “so when it came time to think about this video … the idea of doing something that was also very personal and connected to somebody’s memories — you know, the things in people that they’re not letting go, that maybe they’re hung up on or have issues with — to do a video that touched on some of that felt like it fit with the song really well.”

The “Lost in the Echo” video, set to a typically energetic Linkin Park track, shows a young man walking with a briefcase into ruined buildings in a grim future where photographs don’t exist anymore. Once inside, he opens the case, revealing snapshots to various characters. The actors exhibit some rather extreme emotional responses to the images, which come directly from the Facebook accounts of the viewer and the viewer’s friends. The images are essentially composited in real-time using flash, Nickel said, and each play of the video will be slightly different, even if the same viewer is watching.

“It’s basically like special effects that are being done on the fly.”
“It’s basically like special effects that are being done on the fly,” said Zada, who handled the more traditional directing duties on the “Lost in the Echo” shoot.

To pull off the video’s personalized elements, Nickel wrestled with code to effectively pair Zada’s visuals with the data served up Facebook (no data is retained after the personalized video plays).

“There’s no real API for this kind of thing — we just deal with the raw data from Facebook,” Nickel said. “And even though Facebook actually has algorithms built into the backend on their side to show you who your most popular friends are and all that kind of stuff, [the social network] doesn’t open that up for developers. It’s all up to us to kind of just take the raw data and parse through it to figure out, ‘OK, does this person have a photo and are they tagged in here and how many people are tagged in there?’ It’s all stuff that we have to kind of just come up with from scratch.”

Nickels said he spent a lot of time tweaking his algorithms in an effort to pull in appropriate images. There is a margin of error involved, and he said Tuesday that he was still tinkering with face recognition in an effort to fine-tune the results (“There’s a lot of food pics on Facebook, so it is tough to deal with that for sure,” he said.)

“We ran into a lot of pitfalls with what data people had,” Nickel said. “There’s just so many different ways, different logic flows you could go down depending on how many friends they had, if they have a significant other listed, if that person has a photo, how many photos [the viewer is] tagged in, if there’s anything that’s popular on [their] photo list.”

LOST IN THE ECHO premieres on lostintheecho.com. This is not a traditional video. It is an interactive piece designed to draw you into the world of the song. The best ECHO experience is the one at that site.

Please encourage everyone to go there, not to video sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Video-site versions you find today will be a.) not approved by the band, and b.) not interactive (so to some degree, those versions will be missing the point).

Help us spread the word by letting everyone know that the only place to experience LOST IN THE ECHO is at lostintheecho.com -mike shinoda

*The video is Flash-based, because it was our best way to make this idea work. It is Facebook connected, and don’t worry: it won’t steal or share anything you don’t want it to. For those without those things: a non-Flash, non-interactive version will be up in a couple days on Linkin Park’s official Youtube page. Click To, Get Lost !!

Linkin Park Transforms

Linkin Park guitarist Brad Delson says the band’s new album, Living Things, came together at lightspeed compared to their previous, much more drawn-out creative efforts.

In an interview for Beat magazine to be published on August 1, Delson told me the band started writing Living Things during a break between tour legs for 2010’s A Thousand Suns, so by the time they’d finished the previous album cycle they had a wealth of ideas to work from. “I think sonically or maybe in terms of song approach this album is very different from A Thousand Suns, and part of that was the inspiration of doing something in contrast to what we’d just done,” Delson said. “That’s what makes the studio so fun. There are no rules.”

Delson said producer Rick Rubin suggested one particular change in the band’s working methods that had a profound difference on the outcome. “One thing that Rick would encourage us to do is to put vocals on it right away. That helps us to know if the content is good. Is this song in its barebones form a good song? Whereas our method of working on our first two albums was almost entirely music-focused first, and then the vocals would go last. People say, ‘Is there a message in the album?’ and it’s like, ‘I don’t know! We don’t even know what we just said! We don’t even know what we just played!’ In fact, we make the songs in such a postmodern way that when it’s time to prepare for our tours we literally have to learn how to perform the songs for the first time.”

Aside from putting together live versions of songs from Living Things, the band is excited about another special event: the impending release of a limited edition Transformers action figure set in collaboration with Hasbro, featuring Soundwave, Lazerbeak, Buzzsaw and Ravage. “I’ve definitely put in a request for at least one of them,” Delson said. “I think I deserve to get at least one of those, don’t you think? I know they’re in very high demand. Those collectibles, especially for people who have a love for avant garde toys and collectibles, it’s just such a creative world.”

WATCH LIVE: The Honda Civic Tour LIVE Featuring Linkin Park and Incubus, Sept 8

The summer concert season is wrapping up but before it does AXS TV Concerts has got one more big show for you! LINKIN PARK will broadcast live on SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8th exclusively on AXS TV during the final date of of the HONDA CIVIC TOUR. Along with over 25,000 fans inside THE HOME DEPOT CENTER in CARSON, CA, the AXS TV audience will experience the electricity of the live concert event as the GRAMMY AWARD winning band brings its latest album, "Living Things," to life along with its catalog of chart-topping songs.

AXS TV Co-Founder/Pres. MARK CUBAN said, "AXS TV is the perfect home for LINKIN PARK and the electric show they give fans every night." Our audience will experience this LINKIN PARK concert event in the exact way the band intended -engaged, electrifying and, most importantly, 100% LIVE. We are excited to bring their music to our national audience and invite LINKIN PARK to Burn It Down live on AXS TV." For more go HERE.

Lost In The Echo Video

Interviews Reveal Details on Interactive LOST IN THE ECHO Video and Power the World
In two recent radio interviews from Radio 99.5 Maryland and DC101, Mike Shinoda discussed the customized Honda Civic, upcoming videos from Linkin Park including the interactive LOST IN THE ECHO, VMAs, and Power the World.

In the first video CLICK THIS, Mike details how the upcoming LOST IN THE ECHO video will be an unique video that allows for interactive input from the viewer. He asks for fans to continue to follow the Linkin Park site, twitter, and facebook page for the upcoming announcement of the video.

In the second video CLICK THIS, Mike discusses how, shortly before the first show of the upcoming Honda Civic Tour, the band will be going to the White House to discuss with UN leaders about Power the World. Detailing the reasons behind the band's recent efforts to empower the world with sustainable energy sources, Mike asks for fans to help by donating or signing the pledge in order to spread the word. SIGN THE PLEDGE HERE!!

CLICK THIS to see LOST IN THE ECHO photo.

Linkin Park: Complicated, interesting, nu again

Southern California-based Linkin Park may be, by the band's own reckoning, at least, the most popular hard rock group of the past 10 years. They began as forerunners of the much-maligned nu-metal movement and have gradually morphed into something more complicated and interesting.
Linkin Park's 2010 album "A Thousand Suns" was a supercharged, politically minded electro-rock album that occasioned many previously unthinkable critical comparisons to Radiohead. Fans were less enamored of the band's new sound; its latest release, "Living Things," is a return to form that can't help but feel the slightest bit like a retreat.


In advance of the band's upcoming show with Incubus (they're co-headliners, and each will play full sets), frontman Chester Bennington called in from — well, he's not exactly sure where he's calling from ("Somewhere in, um, North America?") — to talk about being famous, feeling guilty and that time he met The Cure's Robert Smith. It did not go well.

Q: Your last album did really well with critics. Did you feel like Arcade Fire for a week?

A: Yeah. It's funny that you would say it, because we're used to not getting a lot of critical acclaim. We're used to the opposite. Typically, we don't get a lot of praise for our creativity in the same way that other bands may. We're definitely not the cool band of the month, but for some reason we stick around, and people like what we do. It was crazy. We were reading articles, and people were saying nice things about us. It was kind of a shocker.

Q: They were using words like "Radiohead."

A: Yeah, that was getting thrown around a little bit after "A Thousand Suns." People were comparing — not comparing but saying that "A Thousand Suns" was like our "OK Computer" or our "Dark Side of the Moon." That was flattering, because those are two bands we really admire, but we just try to be ourselves.

Q: It seems to have polarized fans more than critics.

A: Yeah, with us we've always had a polarizing effect on people, and on our own fan base. ... There's always gonna be people who think they know what the band should be doing more than the band (does). I kind of find that funny, that people who aren't in the band think they know what we should be doing better than we do.

Q: Your new album debuted at No. 1, which isn't easy for a rock band these days. Do you (have a feel for) how difficult it is out there?

A: It was actually really surprising to me. All of our records have gone to No. 1, with the exception of "Hybrid Theory," which is funny because that's sold (the most copies). No other band has had that kind of success with the charts since we've come out, I guess. And I don't think a lot of people think of us as that band.

Q: Ever wonder why you got picked?

A: I wish it was a popularity contest, and we got like, voted in, because then it would be easy to tell other people, 'This is how we did it ... ' It's not something we deserve. It's not like I was born into this world to be a rock star. ... Everyone's special, everyone has their own story. I like to go to the grocery store. I like to pick my kids up from school. I like to do my laundry. I just like to be a normal person. It's hard for me to think about myself as a big rock star.