Act Two - The Story Continues
Life Forms is a great environment for working on a choreographic composition, and it even provides you with a highly controllable stage where your virtual dancer can perform. But you needn't stop there . Once you have created a figure or animation you can save the data in one of the standard formats supported by Life Forms, and transfer the digital details of your figure to other software packages.
A variety of options are available depending on what you want to do - you can check out the work of teams of choreographers and digital artists that took place at the recent Dance Umbrella event. Also bear in mind that the figure that you are choreographing need not be human, there are suppliers of ready-made models or 'meshes' of animals and objects that you can use, or using a 3D package you can build your own meshes.
If you haven't got a copy of the applications mentioned here, or can't afford them (they tend to be expensive) don't despair. A good hunt around some directories of free and shareware software may well provide you with a tool that does the basics and may even offer you some options the larger packages don't. You can try looking at Yahoo and the other usual suspects, why not check out the superb new Alta Vista search engine, type in 'shareware' together with what type of software you need and see what happens...
Adding another dimension
One of the most popular and visually striking steps to take is to transform your Lifeforms figure from a simple mesh into a realistic 3D figure with skin textures and lighting. Lifeforms has been designed to work with two 3D packages - VPL Research's 'Swivel 3D' and Macromedia's 'Macromodel', and 3D Studio from AutoDesk. It can also export to many other packages including Electric Image (Mac), Alias (SGI), ElectroGIG (SGI), WaveFront (SGI). The only (and important) restriction being that you work in Lifeforms with a Swivel or Macromodel figure from the very beginning of your project - you can't export the default Lifeforms figure.
Each piece of 3D modelling software has its own character and unique facilities, but the basic ideas remain the same. The 3D package reads the individual points that make up your model to build a 3D figure made up of polygons. You can then build whole virtual scenes or theatre sets, which are again described mathematically, and place your model within that scene.
Obviously your 3D model needs to move so that it is possible to see any sequences choreographed in Life Forms. and indeed this is possible. As well as carrying the information that describes your model body as individual points, the Life Forms export file also contains information that describes where each of those points move over time. Any decent 3D modelling package can read this information and so re-create your dance movements.
You can also build in other movements using the animation functions in the modelling package, move lights, or even re-position the virtual camera that dictates the viewing angle for the on-screen performance. When you are happy with your 3D sequence, you can then instruct the software to render the sequence, which will build each scene of your animation, applying all the surfaces and textures to the objects in the scene and calculating all the shadows and reflections that make the scene look realistic. Be warned, however, 3D work can be extremely slow, very frustrating, and hopelessly addictive. It also requires fairly powerful hardware to produce results in reasonable time - leave your machine crunching overnight.
Image by Carol Murcia
PICT- an image
If creating a full 3D model sounds too ambitious, or too expensive, one of the simplest ways of developing the work started on Life Forms is to convert the file holding your dance creation into a PICT image file. An option that can be selected direct from the Life Forms menu. The PICT image can then be used in a whole host of image manipulation packages, such as Photoshop.
Once there you can use all the paint and effects that your package has to offer on the model. Although you won't be able to work on a moving choreographic piece it is often useful to build stills of your work, and in a package like Photoshop you can put together montages of your Life Forms figures in real or virtual settings. Still images, whilst not conveying the true sense of a dance piece that a full animation would, are extremely useful when putting together storyboards or presentations for those occasions when you don't have access to the necessary computer equipment to show your animation.
Making movies
Another, possibly more exciting option, is to export the Life Forms animation as a Quicktime movie. This is a free-standing digital video file that can be played on Macs and PCs. Most machines have small video playing applications such as MoviePlayer that are bundled with a computer's system software. So, this means that you can distribute your dance piece in a form that almost every popular consumer computer system can handle.
If you want more than a video of a dancing wire frame figure, just take a look at some of the Quicktime video processing software. Adobe Premiere and Avid's Videoshop aim to provide you with many of the editing and effects features of a full digital edit suite. You can make sequences of video in a cut and paste fashion and correct or adjust clips at the click of a mouse button. It is also possible to splice segments of the same choreographic sequence to create a virtual multi-camera shoot, or you may like to try you hand at special effects--creating a mix of real and virtual dance.
This approach also has the advantage that you can download your movie to a standard videotape, which can be shown almost anywhere--as long as there is a VHS machine available. Digital video software, like 3D can be very expensive, but shareware software is out there, you just have to search for it.
Interactive Dance
Interactivity in dance is where the computer really excels offering you possibilities that would be more or less impossible in any other medium. There are a number of packages which allow you to sequence and organise sections of dance, or individual models, and bring in music in a similar fashion to the digital video editing packages. However the great difference is that you can add an element of decision making to the piece - characters and models can be made 'hot' so that they spring to life when clicked on, moving the mouse to the left or right will move the on-screen dancers with it.
One of the best pieces of software for this kind of work is Macromedia's Director which is available for both the PC and Mac. This package actually began life as an animation package, but has evolved into being a general authoring tool for many of the CD-ROMs currently available. Its animation capabilities are still very much evident however, and is ideally suited to creating complete shows from the component parts exported from Life Forms. Working in Director you bring your 'cast members' onto a 'stage' and sequence them using the 'score'. In fact the notation used and time-line basis of the score have much in common with earlier developed forms of dance notation, described in Act One.
Image by Chantal Nassari
Back to Act One On to the Finale