Pathways
Live Performance with Unreal Engine
This was a 30 minute audio-visual performane I did with musician & collaborater Lyell Roeder at Spectra Studios
I designed a liminal-esque world where a lone automaton materializes in and out of existence as it moves through choreographed dance sequences, leaving behind emissive trails of light in its wake. I controlled the camera moves and dance sequences live via MIDI in response to the music being played by Lyell
The dances came from a mocap session I did at Zerospace with artist Cameron Surh.
Lyell Roeder on the keys
Process
The movement came from asking Cameron to explore interesting ways of moving across a space in a line. I divided these movement explorations into different categories including ground work, leaps and top work. We leaned on a mixture of contemporary and ballet dance styles. P
I used Blueprints and Niagara in Unreal to setup the virtual avatars, environment, vfx and animation systems. The animation system allowed you to select from different mocap fbx animations, and define snippets to use from them, that you could then play back in non-linear ways, for example with a strong ease out and very slow fade out, combinging digital precision of animation curves with highly organic human movement.
MIDI input was used to control the parameters of this system. When one dance animation triggered, avatar A would fade out while avatar B would fade in doing the animation, allowing you to have moments of overlap between multiple avatars, as one fades out the other is entering.
A photo of me controlling the visuals live
Mocap session using Vicon system from ZeroSpace in Brooklyn, NY
GPU skeletal cloner system in Niagara
The VAT textures that get generated by Niagara and used by the static mesh particles