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Wired.com
June 2002
When the Dance is the Game
The cursor clicks, an icon of a muscular warrior lights up, and the game begins.
The stocky fighter comes to life as an animated 3-D character with boulders
for his head, torso, arms and legs. He kicks and spins in martial-arts moves
as he prepares for battle, his massive stone body moving with surprising agility.
Next the cursor clicks on his adversary - a beautiful woman warrior with a
sword. She turns into wood, her branchlike limbs resembling a deadly skeleton.
With dizzying speed, she twirls and lunges with her sword in a defiant challenge.
The screen flashes "earth vs. wood" and the opponents circle each
other, eyes locked. The onlookers whoop, and the soundtrack kicks into a furious
percussive beat as they begin to battle. No, it's not a scene from a video
game arcade. It's a new dance piece, Avatars, by the tech-focused dance group
Capacitor.
Animating a Dance from Real Life
The dancers from the experimental group Capacitor have put on some pretty
wild outfits in their time.
In one piece, dancers wore lightbulbs on their heads; in another, a dancer
wore a helmet bedecked with flaming torches.
So it must not have seemed too bizarre for five Capacitor dancers to don hats
and spandex suits covered with tiny reflective balls one day in March. In
any case, the ball-covered outfits are normal office wear at the House of
Moves motion capture studio in Los Angeles, where they were about to have
their movements recorded.
Motion capture is a technique for recording human motion to apply it to animated
characters. It is mostly used in creating video games, but it is becoming
increasingly popular in film animation, commercials, music videos and other
media such as dance performances. (Lisa Delgado)
