Designing a MoCap Narrative

I’ve been struggling with the exact narrative form I want this piece about football to have. Part of me wants to have an exact script with dialogue, fleshed out characters, and a clear narrative arc. Currently, I do not have time to do that for this project’s scope (finish in the next 2 weeks). However, this constraint is leading me to a fun creative direction: collage.

To uncover some more subconscious feelings surrounding movements in football and my family’s history, I will use a video collage to arrange the different assets we’ve captured along with voiced narration of an essay I will write about my feelings toward the sport and my family members who’ve played it. I want to highlight the pain my grandfather, father, and uncles have felt while also capturing the joy and camaraderie simultaneously. I want to capture how this game has sent ripples through my family, even now, as I watch games every week because of this connection. As we stitch together all the movements we’ve done so far and plan to do (Move List), I want to see how each movement corresponds with what I write. I will bring an element of play into the project with the collage process, which is what the football movements rely on for The Game. 

The video collage will be a recording of the movements attached to characters in the Unreal Engine. We will also put this video into Touchdesigner, adding many abstract effects to defamiliarize the movements of the game and bring into a more artistic performance context. Michael has figured how to bring the motion data into Touchdesigner, illustrating the patterns of characters moving in particles and lines. I also want to use Touchdesigner so that there will be a live component. I want whoever is watching the video collage to be placed in the video as fans, highlighting how all these moments of pain and joy are shared for spectator’s enjoyment. Perhaps the video could be projected onto mesh screens with projection mapping so that people could see the collage in physical space. But this might be too ambitious for 2 weeks, we’ll see. 

For our next motion capture session, I will be having my actor friend, Nick, play a coach character. We will be using full body, hand, and live face capture through Live Link to Unreal. This coach character will serve as the baseline for the contradictory emotions felt in football. This is fitting because my grandfather was a coach and set the baseline for my entire family as a larger than life character and leader of his Verona, NJ community. 

I have found out recently that my family might have some archival footage of football that my grandfather coached. I would like to implement this footage in the collage but I might not be able to for our class. I would include for the Winter Show, if my aunt still has the footage or I get access from the high school in New Jersey.