Motion capture and time synched animation.
The Skeledance is a choreographed dance routine in Copperdollar’s ‘Back of Beyond’ at Glastonbury.
Our Day of the Dead performers flank the projection of a skeleton performing the same dance.
We manage to get the whole dance floor participating!
Introduced to Glastonbury in 2015, I used a Kinect2 to motion capture a performer doing the dance, cleaned the data, applying the bvh motion to a skeleton within Poser, then lighting and additional effects in After Effects.
I wrote a small app to be able to ‘scrub’ the pre-rendered video to ensure correct start timing when the awesome DJ Marc Stylus dropped the tune!
![](https://mapflaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/skeledance1_L.jpg)
![](https://mapflaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/skeledance2_p.jpg)
The first half of the video is a mock up of one of those medical anatomy posters, but in the second half, I switch to an effect where it looks like there is a skeleton dancing behind the screen. The effect is helped by the fact that previously during our show, real performers have shadow danced behind the screen.