BlackTrax helps young dancers shine
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Content delivery and projection mapping specialists IKONIX - who are based on Australia’s Gold Coast - were asked to help deliver the desired wow factor for the fifth successive year.
At the heart of the solution they created were two Avolites RX8 Ai media servers to deliver images to the rear screen, and two additional units controlling projection onto the stage. Equally central to their vision of the production were Notch real time content generation and BlackTrax real time tracking system, the latter provided by Atlanta-based Visional Productions, and supported by Visional co-founder Kyle Means. IKONIX also supplied Barco 4K resolution, 32,000 lumen projectors.
The use of Notch and BlackTrax was particularly important to Zachary Burton, co-founder with Richard Saunders of IKONIX and the operator at CGEN 2018, because it allowed their creativity free reign by enabling the use of on-the-fly and reactive content to complement the AutoBlend and AutoMap blending and warping functionality available with the Avolites Ai software.
“The specifications for this year’s event were even more challenging and demanding than they had been previously,” recalls Zachary. “Not only did we find ourselves generating over 900 Gigabytes of content with custom content to suit the theme of each piece - but we also supplemented this with Notch generative content, and BlackTrax to track the dancers on-stage.”
In total, the CGEN show featured five pieces of Notch content, including particle trails, magic carpets and cracking floors, while up to seven BlackTrax beacons were deployed, tracking the dancers’ X/Y positional data - pushing the limits of what would usually be achievable with the Avolites media server (Avolites specially upgraded the number of beacons supported by Ai from four to eight for the event) especially as content was being generated concurrently.
(Jim Evans)
