Pixel Perfect

A fascinating discussion with theatre/digital media innovator Robert Gardiner and his stage design class at UBC yesterday reminded me that I've been meaning to post this:

Once again, the dance world is at the cutting edge of interactive projections in live performance. (Shades of Seventh Sense by Anarchy Dance Theatre & Ultra Combos!)

"Pixel is a dance show for 11 dancers in a virtual and living visual environment. A work on illusion combining energy and poetry, fiction and technical achievement, hip hop and circus. A show at the crossroads of arts and at the crossroads of Adrien M / Claire B’s and Mourad Merzouki’s universes."

Artistic Direction and Choreography: Mourad Merzouki
Composed by Mourad Merzouki & Adrien M / Claire B
Digital Design: Adrien Mondot & Claire Bardainne
Music: Armand Amar
Produced by CCN de Créteil et du Val-de-Marne / Compagnie Käfig


Pixel - extraits from Adrien M / Claire B

Some technical background from an interview by Vezér:

"eMotion is an app created by Adrien M / Claire B for creating interactions between graphical objects and real world information. Each scene is a Composition... trigged via OSC from eMotion or from QLab. This allow us to be perfectly in sync with sound. We mainly vary physical parameters (camera positions, frictions, gravity, viscosity, etc.), and trigger some cues in eMotion with the OSC Flag feature in Vezér."

Watch the full-length show on Arte Concert:
http://concert.arte.tv/fr/pixel-par-mourad-merzouki-au-festival-kalypso

And watch them perform some mini-magic using the Leap Motion:


eMotion with the Leap Motion - Pepper's Ghost technique from Adrien M / Claire B

Box by Bot & Dolly

Performer + projection mapping + robotics = Box by Bot & Dolly:



And a behind-the-scenes from The Creators Project:

Meta Martial Arts

Prototype 3D augmented reality Meta Pro SpaceGlasses are my secret weapon against the veillance-gun attack of dastardly Future Cinema Lab mastermind Caitlin Fisher!

Big geeky thanks to Meta Chief Scientist Steve Mann, Meta CTO Raymond Lo, and Steve's whole techno-lair team for a day and night very well misspent.

Apes, Asses and Astronauts

This just in from Ryan Porter of the Toronto Star.

Fun to see Faster than Night and the Theatre@York A Midsummer Night's Dream namechecked alongside a whopping great blockbuster like Dawn of the Planet of the Apes!

Vancouver’s Karin Konoval plays orangutan via performance capture in new Planet of the Apes movie

Playwrights Guild conference

Had a blast at the Playwrights Guild of Canada conference in Montreal yesterday, sharing a panel titled "The Technologized Playwright" with Kevin Cunningham of the amazing NYC-based 3-Legged Dog Theatre + Media Group. 

As promised to those couple of folks who missed the beginning, here are the motion-capture theatre videos I screened:

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Theatre@York)

Faster than Night (Harbourfront Centre HATCH)

Huge thanks to Elyne, Robin, Rebecca, Tina, and everyone else who put together such an enjoyably brain-bursting day!

Faster than Night in the Media

We've had some fantastic coverage of Faster than Night this week. The first is an interview with Pascal Langdale and me by Harbourfront Centre's Margaret Evans, in a fast-paced video by Riley Wallace:



Last night, Morgan Hoffman interviewed Pascal Langdale, Melee Hutton and me for the Space channel's flagship current events show InnerSpace, produced by Mark Askwith:


 

And Jon Kaplan wrote a thoughtful preview of the project in NOW Magazine:

One day till showtime!

Ground Control

(Originally published on praxistheatre.com as part of Harbourfront Centre's HATCH 2014.)

Major Tom gets all the airtime, but there's a whole lot more going on backstage in Houston. Meet some of the amazing tech crew on Faster than Night.

Dynamixyz Performer specialist Solène Morvan tests custom iPhone head-motion-tracking developed by SIRT Centre:

Organic Thoughts from an Artificial Intelligence

by Melee Hutton

(Originally published on praxistheatre.com as part of Harbourfront Centre's HATCH 2014.)

Working on Faster Than Night has been a literal education for me. Not just in the field of social media, where my knowledge hovers somewhere around my own Facebook page and not much more, but also in the world of artificial intelligence.

Playing a quantum A.I is flattering but daunting. Along with it come actor questions I’ve never asked before, but perhaps will ask more often in the future.

Supernaturalism

(Originally published on praxistheatre.com as part of Harbourfront Centre's HATCH 2014.)

"Naturalism is a good word for a bad idea. Art is to do with transformation." 

– Ariane Mnouchkine

Motion-capture maestro Andy Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, The Adventures of Tintin, and The Lord of the Rings.

In our first and latest posts, we explored how motion capture and real-time animation works. But we haven’t really talked about why one would want to use it in live performance, or what stories it tells best.

These are key questions. Live animation takes a lot of extra work and costs a bomb. It makes it hard to describe the show to theatre audiences (other parts make it hard to explain to game designers and 3D animators). And it affects the story in a fundamental way. Or at least, it should. Otherwise you’re just sprinkling digital pixie dust on top of a play and hoping no one will notice the story would be better told in television or videogame or non-mocap-theatre form.

Throughout the script development process we’ve asked again and again: why are we telling this story with this technology?

Masks, Morphing and Live Motion Capture

(Originally published on praxistheatre.com as part of Harbourfront Centre's HATCH 2014.)

Balinese topeng masks (Gunawan Kartapranata)

As far as we're aware, Faster than Night is one of the first handful of theatre productions in the world to use facial performance capture live on stage. But while from one perspective it is cutting-edge technology, it is also just the latest mutation of an artform that has been used in theatre for millennia: the mask.

Design Team Work-in-Progress

(Originally published on praxistheatre.com as part of Harbourfront Centre's HATCH 2014.)

A longer post is coming soon with details on the 3D facial model work being done by Centaur Digital and Dynamixyz, but to tide you over, here are a few more elements from our talented creative team.

First up, the design of the starship Envoy by Mike Nesbitt and Caroline Stephenson of Capture Scratch:

Next, "Like Clockwork" by composer and audio designer Will Mountain, via Vapor Music: