Carry Me Home: The First Ever Live and Virtual Circus Experience
The 7 Fingers, an indie circus company founded in 2002, is known for crafting multidisciplinary performances that uniquely blend circus, contemporary dance, theater, and historical research.
Co-founded by artistic director Samuel Tétreault and his colleagues, The 7 Fingers develops its own shows and writes its own stories, all rooted in personal experiences. As Samuel puts it, “we tell human stories at superhuman capacity. Our projects are at the epicenter of live art and new technology’s convergence.”
Seeking out discoveries that could take The 7 Fingers’ shows to new heights, Samuel and his team joined forces with Shocap Entertainment’s Creative Director, Athomas Goldberg, and entered the world of performance capture to create Carry Me Home.
With this show, Athomas proposed a challenge: could they create the first live multi-reality performance that takes audiences on a unique journey across music, circus, and 3D animation?
Animatrik's studios are equipped with the latest virtual production and performance capture technology, staffed with highly skilled professionals dedicated to bringing characters to life in a digital world. To answer Athomas’ question, this was the place to start.
Developing the idea
The project began with a three-day workshop in January 2020 at Animatrik’s performance capture studios in Burnaby. There, The 7 Fingers could explore the world of motion and performance capture, and understand how this technology could showcase their performances through game engines in real-time.
“Our time at Animatrik’s studio showed us all of the potential for a show of this scale, but we quickly learnt the need to start small and focus on effectively combining our specialties,” Samuel says. “That’s when we had the idea to create a concert series — a concept that allowed us to feature independent musicians, singers, and songwriters to convey the inspiration and backstory behind their music.”
The 7 Fingers decided to invite an audience into the creative mind of a musician. The show would be a live deep dive into the memories, imagination, and inspiration of the songs, and the virtual environment would bring everything to life.
With years of acrobatic and musical experience behind him, and appealing to the human-oriented stories that The 7 Fingers typically told, Didier Stowe was the ideal choice. Having Didier perform a concert live enabled The 7 Fingers to convey that one performance across different platforms, each offering unique aspects, but all possessing layers of richness. “We were creating portals from reality to the virtual world, all conveying their own levels of immersion,” continues Samuel.
Animating the Impossible
Animatrik was involved from an early stage, bringing The 7 Fingers' creative vision to life by providing high quality performance capture. “Animatrik was one of the few teams that could deliver a project of this scale,” says Samuel. “Combining circus with real-time tech, performance capture, virtual reality, and virtual production? No-one else could have helped us achieve that.”
The idea was to have the audience see the performers on stage, while their movements were synchronized to virtual counterparts in real-time. Meanwhile, viewers could join from all over the globe, witnessing the entire imaginary world via VR and online streaming.
A combination of VR and mocap technologies was used to create the virtual components. Each song gave birth to its own universe and was displayed on-screen behind the performers using virtual production techniques, simultaneously with a digital environment for online viewers.
“We could situate our audience within a virtual desert as Didier performed in the middle, or in a glass bottle floating in the ocean whilst a performance was happening inside that bottle,” Samuel adds.
Animatrik ensured that The 7 Fingers could worry less about the technology involved, and focus more on the creative aspects such as choreography. “One of the biggest challenges was the fact that everything needed to be done without a post production process,” Samuel adds. “With lots of intricate choreography going on, the accuracy of the motion capture needed to be crisp.”
Animatrik worked closely with The 7 Fingers to understand their needs and deployed bespoke solutions to address them. This included finding a way to replace reflectors with infrared markers, in order to bring out the most sensitivity in the system without live onlookers noticing.
The team at Animatrik got to work providing small customized markers that could be placed into suits designed with 50+ pockets to hide any wires or markers without affecting the aesthetics of the live performance. Doing so also removed any discomfort for the performers whilst attempting stunts such as using the aerial ring, when an acrobat could slide over the markers and potentially injuring themselves.
Continuing the series
The collaboration between The 7 Fingers, Shocap, and Animatrik for the Carry Me Home show was a great success, with 2020’s performance receiving positive feedback from audiences. In December 2022, they embarked on a second show, building on their previous experience.
One key lesson learned was the importance of preparation ahead of time to ensure optimal virtual camera positions, Unreal Engine camera positions, and virtual lighting. By planning meticulously ahead of time, the animation and choreography worked seamlessly, and every member of The 7 Fingers was more comfortable in their roles.
The 7 Fingers' Lab7 conducts research on hybrid experiences. Findings from Carry Me Home show that monitoring heat, heart rate, and humidity during an event provides insight into audience immersion. Preliminary results suggest that in-VR audiences are as engaged or more engaged than in-show audiences, indicating that a live VR experience can be as engaging as a live stage show.
Moments of transition from one venue to the next were particularly noteworthy, as in VR, the whole world changes around the user, providing a unique and immersive experience. Combining the thrill of in-person experiences with immersive digital environments, The 7 Fingers in collaboration with Shocap Entertainment and Animatrik is finding new ways to showcase the live arts.