ISLAND
3D ANIMATION | MOTION CAPTURE | LIVE DANCE PERFORMANCE
TECHNOLOGY: Motion Capture / Motion Builder / Maya / Houdini / Premiere
PERFORMER: Sarah Amores
ADVISOR: Toni Dove / Mark Skwarek / Todd Bryant
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.
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 daily life so that it will have the power to ‘‘speak’’ directly to people.
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.
Ideation
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. With 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 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?
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 a 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 a virtual world or physical space) can reflect inter-human or human-society relationships, which might be a good way to express my idea.
According to the four scenes I want to show in the performance, I created a storyboard as the guide of my mocap recording.
Staging
I decided to set an LED cube on the stage as the enclosed space for my dancer to perform. I was also thinking of 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 an 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 hooked it up with an LED light.
As a 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.
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.
