This LFW getting tech-savvy has been a cause celebre, with London Fashion Week Live streaming blogs and Tweets from "Insiders" and "Fashion Fans", while Swarovski, the gem giant,make LFW crystal clear with their Swarovski TV, a partnership with a few lucky bloggers giving sneak peaks from the shows, behind the scenes, and exclusive interviews with designers and models. For their debut Augmented Reality (AR) issue, (a new-fangled format for viewing moving image seen already in mainstream magazines Esquire and Wallpaper), Dazed & Confused take London Fashion Week as an opportunity to jump on the digital bandwagon.

Featuring designs from the latest Spring Summer 2010 collections, Davidson teamed up with Dazed Fashion Editor Karen Langley who selected looks from designers such as Vivienne Westwood, Antonio Maras, Jil Sander and Calvin Klein. After you've waved your mag at your webcam to see fashion in motion, Pokeware allows the viewer to pause and see clothing credits overlaid on the image.

"The premise for Dazed was to use the films as the core of the issue, and the stills are secondary element." Describes Davidson, "So every image in the magazine is a reference to a film that’s online."

While it's apparently old news to tech-heads, AR seems to have sidled into the mainstream with speed, "I knew about the technology, I’d seen the symbols in newspapers which launch an AR ad. I knew of the term, I just didn’t really understand it until I got into it."  " Davidson admits, "It's a broad term for a lot of different pieces of small technology, but really it's a way of getting people to interact with the internet."  

The Concept For The Film

"I liked the idea that each spread opened another world. So I thought of five different scenarios inside a room, in which five girls are trying to get out- so the 2D image is escaping into a 3D, moving image world. That’s what’s interesting about AR, it’s a bridge between the printed magazine and the moving image world."

"We went from making five vignettes to just one narrative, because of budget restrictions - it was too difficult to shoot that much - so it became one long piece where the girls are running from different rooms trying to escape."

Location Location Location

"The location was really important to the story telling- it influences you when you're shooting, and because it's moving image it's all about what's in the background. It had a huge influence on the look and feel."

"We found the disused country club, about an hour from north London." 

"I don’t think the medium had an influence on the location; it was more the narrative that influenced the location. I needed to find somewhere that told the story- it's quite a dark piece and it needed to feel creepy and sinister with lots of rooms and a corridor."

Daniel Lea, Sound Designer, on creating the sound.

"I didn't consider Augmented Reality when making the soundtrack. I was making the sound for a film which happens to be shown in that format. I did consider it when I realised that most people would be listening to it through laptop speakers."

"We wanted the sound to be quite harsh, violent and industrial. We didn't want to score the film, as it's very short. Yet all the sounds are made from instruments and percussion, so in a sense it is acoustically scored."

"Opposite my studio there was an empty wood room which my landlord was fixing up. The acoustics in the room were amazing so I ran four microphones into the room and recorded most of the sound in there. I recorded bowed cymbals, beaten gas heaters,scraping metal plates, extractor fans, low toms, and drilled wood.  I also used archive of recorded sounds; violins, boilers, ebows, clangs and bangs, room tones, and pitched down recorders to create sub tones. The film is mainly made up of different tones from bowed cymbals- you can get rich low end drones, and industrial harsh metallic sounds."

"I threw down a lot of ideas for the film at first and then stripped it right back. My favourite part in doing film scores and sound design is creating gaps of pure silence and atmosphere. It's all about the film, and you have to be true to that- there's nothing worse than over-scoring a film."

Listen to the Soundtrack in full here

So, will AR be embraced by the fashion community?

"It has to be embraced because that’s the way the technology is moving." Davidson says, matter-of-fact. "There’s a real buzz about moving image in the fashion world at the moment. Everyone's seeing where it will go, but it's just whether there’s enough money to put into it, because moving image costs so much more. In terms of fashion  it's just a more interactive medium- fashion photography is about selling clothes, and a moving image piece can show you the garments in a great way, and sells them by creating a tangible idea."

"The thing that's really shifted the fashion world is blogging - online magazines are now influencing paper magazines.. My shoots come out on the blogs before they come out in the magazines. People want to see things immediately, if you’ve already seen it on a blog, and then you see it in the magazine, then you’ve already experienced it. The fashion blogs are so powerful; they’re getting front row seats at shows, it's very interesting.

See more of Will Davidson's films and photography here - http://willdavidson.com/

See Daniel Lea's studio here - http://goldenhum.com

See the Dazed Digital "How To Watch AR" clip here