The Surprise in the Mocap Studio
I'm genuinely super excited about how the different facets of our digital dance project are starting to come together.
My past experiences of motion capture could be summed up in one word: reductive.
The latency between live movement and what gets captured. The way certain things — like the articulation of your back — simply don't register. The extra effort it takes just to make force or speed visible.
Today was the opposite. And I felt completely spoilt.
Thanks to the support of CoStar Edinburgh — a state-of-the-art R&D facility built to drive the next generation of screen technology and on-set virtual production — and in the expert hands of Calum Main, I had the space and time to genuinely experiment. More sensors meant the captured movement actually felt like me. Next to no latency meant I could stay in the moment, rather than editing and adjusting as I moved. It's given me solid grounding for what needs to happen when we go into residency at City Moves in July.
What's exciting is that today's capture will also inform the story box itself — my movement physically embodied within its design. Our narrative is an internal one, the kind our LGBTQ+ community navigates daily. So it feels right that the movement won't only live as something you see in film and AR, but as a physical form held within the box.
But the biggest surprise was something more personal.
I'll be honest. As an older man returning to dance after hip surgery and a difficult recovery, I'm not where I feel I should be physically. That brings personal demons I'm learning to navigate gently. And part of making movement means filming yourself and watching it back — and who doesn't hate watching themselves?
Today, the playback wasn't me on a screen. It was my captured movement on a digital mannequin. And instantly, the negativity was gone. I could see clearly what to focus on, what to explore more, what to do less of. It was just a body moving. Not mine — and because of that, I could meet it with honesty instead of judgment.