Working again with Athena Mazarakis and for the first time with Hansel Nezza and the very very talented set designer Jenni-Lee Crew and lighting designer Barry Strydom. Steven Kretzmann wrote a fantastic review on the National Arts Festival Blog, it also gives a good description of what the performance was.
Trailer at Marabula:
INTER.FEAR by Athena Mazarakis & Hansel Nezza from MARABULA on Vimeo.
Working with Kinect & Processing:
I’ve been out of the theatre world for a while, so I really enjoyed getting back into it. I used the XBox Kinect sensor (perhaps not the best idea in retrospect – as it’s skeletal tracking range is really shallow) with Processing to make a few digital interventions into the shadow world. Using both Skeletal Tracking and Center of Mass tracking for most of the work.
I’ve attached one of files if you are interested. It is from the first scene where Athena “remotely” controls a shadow on Hansel’s chest with her own skeletal tracking. I have not included any others as they are very much part of the piece and hard to use out of context and off that particular set. But let me know if you have questions on them, remember these were really a first entry into the world of Kinect and Processing. I got alot of help from the Making Things See book by Greg Borenstien, and I highly recommend getting a copy if you are starting out and want to know the in’s and out’s of the Kinect.
Christo Doherty made great photo documentation of the development process between all of us. The image above are from this documentation but can also be found in 5 parts on his Flickr account: Inter.Fear Creative Process Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 (just before leaving for Grahamstown).