LENA HERZOG

STUDIO

Motion Capture of a 360 Dance

Hensen Studio, Charlie Chaplin Stage
Director Lena Herzog, VR engineer Jonathan Yomayuza
choreographer JoAnn Jansen, dancers Marissa Vela-Baile Kayla Kalbfleisch,
Mocap Supervisor Brian Rausch, stunt coordinator Nick Brett

May 2025

CONCEPT & DIRECTION (LENA HERZOG): choreographing an anti-gravity 360 dance of many souls in which dance begins from lifeless to awakening, to full of life,  to breaking through the light. Choice of music, Vivaldi, made in order to ground the audience in the classical and the familiar after the atonal and crushing sound design of Any War Any Enemy.

“At the Charlie Chaplin Stage of the Hensen Studios, we worked with the great choreographer JoAnn Jensen and her dancers, who have worked with director Cameron on “Avatar” and other motion capture technology. A Hollywood veteran stunt team headed by Nick Brett brought in a rig called “The Lollipop,” which could smoothly hoist the dancers in any direction while safely holding them in a harness that could rotate in 360 degrees. Hence the mocap figures showed organic human dance suspended and propelled while dancing all around themselves.

The dancers’ weightlessness made possible by “The Lollipop” allowed for an unlimited range of motion, and gave us room to easily adjust the mocap data in-engine. With the help of a control rig built in-engine, we were able to connect multiple takes of animation and align them so they felt like one continuous performance.

We had over an hour of mocap data from the two dancers. Retargeting the mocap animations to our latest soul rig was handled entirely in-engine, and once that was ready, we got to work assembling the dance. I started with the main soul, letting its motion lead the way. Guided by the sound and direction of the scene, I began blocking out the animation along the timeline. By adjusting speed and orientation, we were able to make the dance feel like a single take led by the music, when in reality, it was assembled from multiple takes, each recorded independently of the final audio track. The supporting souls moved in a synchronized-yet-asynchronous way. Following the lead of the main soul at first, then slowly gaining their own independence, as if they were being awakened. The key element here was to listen to the flow of motions captured from the dancers and then assembling them in a layout that compositionally and dramatically worked.”

— Jonathan Yomayuza (Technical Director, TRINITY)