I need to focus on getting performance captured at an acceptable accuracy and the performance abstracted at a level that the limits of each will meet in a pleasing manner. There’s a few things to unpack here. On the left is Humanity, the subject, the performer, the verbatim performance. On the right is Technology, the distribution medium, traditional live theatre at least, full animation at most. The other part of this is the technology bolstering or adding to the creative process. I can confidently say in this situation, digital staging can be implemented as a foundation that will not distract from human performance, it is filling the practical gap needed to fill for the distribution of the work, which is why i’m allowing it to encroach on the left. To what degree the subjects are digitally abstracted on the digital stage is another dilemma. What i mean by this is that the subjects could simply appear as video planes in a virtual environment, or augmented in a small way to give fake depth.
Realised practically, a footage plate of a recorded head could be a 2d sprite on a 3D body armature, I was even thinking perhaps in a ‘moon suit’ head bowl with digital refraction and reflection to disguise the simple footage plate. Another concept that I’ve executed previously is wrapping footage plates on 3d mesh to give the appearance of a head in 3d space building the cheeks and nose with topology. I realise I am not reinventing the wheel here, but I am combining a number of different methods to act as surrogates that fill in the limitations of each. I intend to layer performance.
