Working closely with the creative team at AKQA, we designed a series preliminary character development artwork. Once the basic look of the character was established, we set about designing 12 male characters and 12 female characters based on 12 musical genres. We also designed 12 environments for the characters
We designed a system whereby the defining characteristics could be swapped around and combined to create a unique animated DanceBot.
We built a male and female rig, and animated each for the 12 different musical genres. The idea was to create a fun dance that conveyed the essence of that musical genre.
Then each of the characters were animated to each dance, ending up with 288 separate dancing characters.
These were then split into 3 differing skin tones and then further split into separate layers. All these layers could then be combined to produce millions of unique combinations.
Users were invited to take part in a BuzzFeed quiz that determined their “unique musical DNA” The results of this quiz were then put through an algorithm that would determine what their DanceBot would look like. They could personalise their DanceBot further by adding their name via Facebook that would appear as part of the background graphic.
We utilised Impossible Software’s realtime video personalisation platform to render all the seperate layers into 3 possible outputs – video for first look and social sharing, animated GIF to see you DanceBot appearing with all the others on the Music Showdown website or static PNG used at the festival itself to print onto personalised merchandise in the VIP area.
