Duration
February 2023
Role
Artist
Tools
Unreal (Niagara, Blueprints, Material Editor)
Highlights
Designed and built system in Unreal engine for performing live mocap dance data using MIDI input
30 min long audio-visual real-time performance
Captured mocap from dancer using Vicon mocap system at Zerospace in Brooklyn
Brought together in 3 days
About
Using some of the art and systems I had been building in Unreal engine for my Pathways project, I quickly put together in 3 days a production version that I used to perform a 30 minute audio-visual set for a crowd of about 50 or so people.
Leaving heavily on Blueprints, Niagara, custom materials, and MIDI as input, I designed a world where a lone automaton-like avatar materializes in and out of existence as it moves through various dance sequences, leaving behind emissive trails of light.
For animation, I built a system for creating snippets of animation from a larger sequence, and allowing the ability to re-time those sequences to play back at non linear rates and assign these different snippets to MIDI inputs for live triggering.
All of the dance animation came from a mocap session I did at Zerospace last year with a dancer friend. I gave him the prompt to explore interesting ways of moving across a space in a line, and divided these movement explorations into different categories including things like ground work, leaps and top flows. We leaned on a mixture of contemporary and ballet dance styles.
Live music by: Lyell
Dance by: Cameron Surh
Motion capture tech: Zerospace
Photography: Miguel Gonzalez