To celebrate the upcoming Halloween, here's a post about a dance I choreographed and performed in for Cirque Du Surgery (UNSW Med Revue 2013).
Behind the scenes:
16150 cells in this Excel table
My co-choreographer Ben and I went through sequencing
which circuit which light-suits would switch on and off at every
millisecond. Above is a brief screenshot of how we did it.
The lyrics to Skrillex
Also since we were using dub-step in the finale of the dance, and that genre sounds like a bunch of industrial noise, it was challenging to choreograph and sequence to every sound we heard. As you can see on the right, I wrote some lyrics so the dancers and I, could keep track of what was happening. Sadly, it's now one of the few songs I know the whole 'lyrics' too (Dubstep karoake anyone?).
Choreography and stunts during that light section happened in the space of about one week. It was super fun, but intense trying to meet all the deadlines. The fragile suits had only just started being finished, meaning limited time to practice and also issues like which crazy moves were feasible and broken wires arose. I may also have incurred a carpet burn on my head whilst face-planting after a stunt gone wrong. I wish I had more time, and made that section longer, bigger, more epic, but I didn't account for the amount of man-hours it would take to just make the suits themselves. For just university students, I think we did well with our limited resources. Also coming up with choreography that was unique and not just doing an easy copy-cat of what's been done already with the concept is what I hope I for. One tiny example of originality I'm proud of, is the illusion where one suit 'jumps' into another suit. In my head I can still visualise so many more things with light suit dances that haven't even been done by the professional troupes.
I spent an unreasonable amount of time on sound editing with Audacity (probably over a hundred hours) since I didn't just want a generic sound-track. I wanted humour, stunts, interesting sound fx,blended in an entertaining ball of craziness that exploded in a visual spectacle.
To do this, I mixed and edited over 13 music songs, and countless sound effects (I sourced over 300 sound files throughout the process). I probably enjoyed crafting the loop build-up to Gorillaz Feel Good the most, and spent most of the time crafting from bare-bones, the entire robotic section and percussion beats into Ben Lee's Catch My Disease.
Tracks that were cut but discarded include: Cypress Hill - Insane in the Brain, Owl City - Fireflies [I wanted suits to combine and make a huge flying insect illusion], Stan Walker - Light it Up, Jay Sean - Hit the Lights, Kanye West - All Of The Lights, Ellie Goulding - Lights, DJ Earworm - United State of Pop 2013 [Each song would be represented by a lit-up dancer], and La Roux - Bulletproof (Hyper crush remix) [as the finale instead of Skrillex].
The actual engineering process behind the EL Wire suits belongs to Hamish Pain, head of the special effects team. He's the brain behind the Arduino controllers and all that funky magical Wi-Fi stuff. It's basically impossible to compensate him for the hundreds of hours he put into leading them the team in designing the suits themselves. From sewing to trouble-shooting, and programming, his geekiness was our godsend.
Hamish and two directors helping construct the suits
Many late nights, and thousands of stitches
A sweatshop of trial and error
Aldri Indrayana, a talented guy with a background in fashion design, helped sketch the design of the suits. Each circuit; skeletal, arterial and venous had to be done in one continuous line. It took several iterations from the initial TRON inspired sketches, to get to the final version.
The very beginning. Pink ribs anyone?
Idea for the design on the back; a combined huge laughing skull
Final skeleton
As a medical student, I was finally happy when it was more anatomically realistic
Of course executing this design was troubling itself as EL wires aren't exactly easy to hold in complex intricate shapes.
Before green skulls on a balaclava, the initial idea involved black facemasks
That circle heart (aka Iron Man's Arc Reactor)
Hunger Games + Matrix
The whole squad
Thanks guys and everyone else that was involved :)
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