Dizzee Rascal performs on the Swedish set of his video "Bonkers".

Once at the forefront of the UK’s burgeoning grime scene, London MC Dizzee Rascal has ditched the dark, urban sound he helped popularize to take a stab at pop stardom. His latest single, “Bonkers”, a collaboration with superstar house producer Armen Van Helden, is his most manic dance floor offering yet.

With its high-speed beat, grinding bass, siren sounds and R&B breakdowns, it’s the sonic equivalent to a shot of adrenaline. For the video, Swedish directing collective Popcore (repped by Colonel Blimp) hooked into “Bonkers” juiced-up energy and created an appropriately zany party video using an industrial panoramic “spherical vision” digital camera called the LadyBug2.

Manufactured by Richmond, British Columbia-based Point Grey Research, the camera looks a miniature water cooler mounted atop two VCRs. It uses six camera lenses to capture 75% of a 360-degree view around it and then stitches the footage together into a linear panorama landscape. For “Bonkers”, Popcore went a step further, using Apple’s Shake compositing software to convert the linear image into a sphere that was projected behind Dizzee and his entourage of candy-colored party kids so it looks like they’re pogo-ing on a spinning globe.

A pre-spherical panoramic cityscape, captured by the LadyBug2.

The panoramic view converted into a sphere using Apple Shake.

Unable to source a LadyBug2 in Scandinavia, the directors imported one from Paris that came with its own operator. The shoot took place in Stockholm over two days. On day one, the directors mounted the camera on the roof of a car and drove around the city, capturing the panoramic shots that they could playback on a laptop in the front seat.

“It was pretty easy to use. Temperature was the biggest challenge,” says Granstand. “It didn’t like the Swedish climate. It must be used to spring in Paris or something. It was around zero Celsius and after a while we had problems: it stopped shooting, so we had to take it into the car and warm it up and then get it out on top of the car again to film again. It was almost like having a baby.”

Another challenge was balancing distance between the road and the skyline so as not to create an odd perspective. Driving under a bridge or gas station overhang would completely obscure the 360-degree effect. “It looked best when we were in the middle of the road,” says Grandstand. “So we were driving really badly on the wrong side of the road and in bus lanes.”

The Ladybug2 camera rig mounted atop Popcore's car.

On the second day, Popcore filmed the performance scenes, with Dizzee rapping against a green screen and atop a moving flatbed truck, sometimes solo, sometimes dressed in a shark suit, other times surrounded by a group of partying extras. The shoot lasted 18-hours, with Dizzee keeping apace with his warp-speed dance track well into the night.

Check out a few behind-the-scenes shots from the “Bonkers” set below and then watch the finished video in the screening room.