Adobe Remix - S1T2

The Story

Adobe reached out to S1T2 to put our spin on their logo for the 2017 Adobe Marketing Symposium at the Sydney Opera House.

With just over a month to make it happen, everyone threw caution to the wind and opened the show with a live remix using a dancer and pianist's performance to generate real time visuals.

The Concept

With A.I. being the buzz word of the conference we wanted to use the performance to explore the relationship between creatives and their increasingly intelligent tools.

Our Pianist Gavin Ahearn plays the role of "The Creative" as he begins to explore his canvas and our suited ninja Naomi Hibberd plays the role of our A.I. muse that takes The Creatives inputs to a new plane of inspiration.

The result we hoped would be a symbiotic duet where these forces become inseparable in creating a unique Adobe logo.

The Music

Gavin Ahearn - Composer
"We wanted to create a theme that represented the process of creativity. For that reason the main theme of the music is accumulative, it starts with one note, then two, and the final iteration of the theme is seven notes.

The original ideas were improvised but then honed over a few versions. This essential ingredient in this process was the degree of feedback and interaction from S1T2 and Naomi Hibbard (choreography) regarding the structure and vibe of the piece.

The three elements of the content; visual, dance and music were all fluid throughout the creation period, with each element feeding back off the other two elements."

The Dance

Naomi Hibberd - Choreography

"I was excited about the collaboration, Chris sent through a story board that helped me create small snippets of movement that I thought would work well for the story and showing off the technology. I filmed them in a studio and sent the footage

on to the team.

After that we came together and started to piece together the puzzle with the help of Ian for artistic direction. When we finally got the motion capture suit it was a very exciting day but we soon found out that some movements like rolling on the floor too much had to go in the bin as well as then having glitching problems with my right foot. After alot of trial and error rehearsals we finally go to the performance, which I am very proud of."

The Performance

The performance spans across a series of distinct beats, beginning with The Creatives inquisitive play and expression, as he explores the canvas.

As his exploration becomes more purposeful we see the awakening of our artificial muse as she slowly gains an affinity with The Creatives input that has awakened her. Both spirits enter a dialogue together as their powers expand, and with growing comfort both revel in their duet together, racing towards a momentary breath.

Emboldened by each others capability to create they explode into a final burst of inspiration before finally The Creative curatives his creation into its final form.

The Tech

We have a motion capture set up in the studio, so the original idea was to install these cameras on stage, kind of what our timelines and concept was counting on.

The problem was it quickly became clear that we weren’t going to be able to make that happen due to the realities of bump in and rehearsal times.

So we sent out an SOS beyond our shores and hooked up with the team at Rokoko in Denmark who were developing an experimental inertia capture suit. Imagine sticking 19 Iphones to your leotard.

With no cameras, we were free’d to jump on and off stage in no time, but we traded that problem for the host of others you always face with new tech and creative applications. The time zones and International delivery delays demanded a unique level of creative problem solving but with both sides of the coin showing the same insanity as the other we made it onstage.

The Code

Given the short amount of time for iteration, we decided to use OpenFrameworks and OpenGL shaders to create the particle systems necessary to fit the aesthetic brief. Our artists initially mocked up particle motion feel using pre-rendered video which gave us a lot of direction in terms of what kind of physics should be applied to particles and when.

After the initial research and development phase we decided to use three kinds of particle effects. The first was a robust particle system that would be attracted and repulsed by the dancer during certain scenes with a few other functions like spraying particles when her foot hit the floor at a certain velocity threshold, the second was a system that would ‘inherit’ the motion of those particles and draw trails which followed particles that had accelerated motion and the third was an ambient static particle system that was rendered to create a slight sense of depth within the scene. We also created a ribbon system that would draw ribbons using the dancers bone positions, this was to emphasise the correlation of her physical and virtual self.