Island

3D Animation | Motion Capture | Live Dance Performance | NYU IDM Thesis

What does solitude mean to you? What are the possibilities motion capture could bring to psychological studies?

I found that although a lot of people would choose solitude sometimes, a lot of their solitary experience starts from painful situations and they actually couldn’t fully enjoy it. The piece is about how to take the opportunity solitude provides to turn a negative state of being into a positive one.

The whole performance is divided into four chapters, escape dissociation, choice, and solitude. Pain and struggle are shown at the beginning and middle and the journey ends up with peace, which forms a nice narrative curve.

Performer

Sarah Amores

Advisor

Toni Dove / Mark Skwarek

Verbal language, facial expressions, and body movement can all be used to express emotions, but body language is more direct and unable to conceal compared to the others. Dance is an art that includes more overdramatic movements than does daily life so that it will have the power to ‘‘speak’’ directly to people.

Idea

With urbanization, more and more people tend to live in cities, and escaping to nature is sometimes not easy, either because of the costs or because of transportation challenges.

Also, technological progress profoundly affects the human experience, as well as solitude. By the widespread use of social media and the perceived pressure to always be online, spending time alone has become increasingly difficult. But technology may also foster solitude because it could actually reduce the time and energy people need to spend on human interactions. Meanwhile, how we spend our solitary time also changes.

It’s a practical problem for all of us to think about: How to enjoy solitude in our stressful urban daily lives with so many constraints?

Inspiration

• Bodies in Motion

  The motion of human bodies can express a lot of inner feelings, and how the performers interact with their surroundings(which can be virtual world or physical space) can reflect inter-human or human-society relationships, which might be a good way to express my idea.

• Physical Installations

The motion of human bodies can express a lot of inner feelings, and how the performers interact with their surroundings(which can be virtual world or physical space) can reflect inter-human or human-society relationships, which might be a good way to express my idea.

early test

Since I decided to set a LED cube on the stage as the enclosed space for my dancer to perform. I was also thinking building an audio reactive LED system to add more interactions, but I’m not too sure about the final effect on the stage, so I began with building a small prototype first.

I went to Canal Plastic Center to buy some acyclic sticks and a LED shop to see the LED strips. I cut those acyclic sticks by even length and glued them up. To test the audio reactive function, I used a microphone sound detector as the signal input and hook it up with a LED light.

After trying to adjust the dial to change its sensitivity, I still feel the light flashes too much and it’s not appropriate for the show. Meanwhile, I don’t like the point light LED strips have. As the result, I bought some neon light strips to see if they look better.

For the cube, I bought some transparent PVC tubes and joints instead of acyclic because they are cheaper and easier to assemble.

Assemble

I brought those PVC tubes I bought to the Black Box and assembled them into a cube frame as the most important prop.

Storyboard

According to the four scenes I want to show in the performance, I created a storyboard as the guide of my mocap recording.

Sound

In order to help the dancer get a better sense of what I want at the recording, I found some loyal free songs online. I used a website called Epidemic Sound. It provides the service of searching by mood and movements which I found super useful.

Besides the music, I also want to add some sound effects like breathe and annoying ambient sound, so I found some on Freesound.

Recording

Before we started the formal recording. I played those soundtracks I chose and asked Sarah(my dancer) to free dance according to it. I see this part as a test for the accuracy of music as well as a chance to get some surprisingly good takes from the dancer’s perspective.

For the second part, I walked through my storyboard with Sarah and gave her instructions while she was dancing. For each scene, we took two or three takes as backup. My advisor Toni Dove also came by to the studio to help me with the process.

Render

I assigned the motion capture data to my rigged female model and baked the animation in MotionBuilder. Then imported the animation into Houdini to do the particle effects then rendered them out. Next, I imported everything into Premiere to do the editing.

Conclusion

Everyone’s solitary experience is different. Through the researching process, I found that some people enjoy solitude because they love the freedom, the quiet, or the efficiency solitude could bring to them, but most people’s solitary experiences start from unpleasant emotions. They see solitude as a way to temporarily escape from reality. Escaping is not the ultimate way to solve problems, but it does give people time to take a breathe and recover from pain. We should respect it. I know it’s hard, but we should try to take advantage of the opportunity urban solitude offers to turn a painful state of being into a positive one. Maybe we can’t change the outer condition a lot, but we could transform ourselves from the inside. Also, I want to mention that, sociability doesn’t conflict with solitude. A person would need social contacts as well as time to be alone.

Next Step

For this project, my participants and the amount of academic research I conducted were limited, so the final result might be inaccurate and subjective. A lot more study is still needed. After the performance, I run a feedback session and got a lot of valuable suggestions. The project would be greater if I had the chance to more iterations.

 Also, I’d like to keep exploring the use of motion capture not only as recording data for games and animations but also as a format of performing art. In the future version of the project, I would like to do the motion capture part live and get the audience involved in the performance, which might enhance the experience. 

With the future development of human technology and culture, the format of solitude may keep changing, so dreaming about that is also interesting.