Zoic Studios is a company of accomplished artists and producers. All team members are masters in their fields of 3D, Compositing, and Production Management. For this year’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Zoic Studios was asked by Leo Burnett Chicago executive producer Juan Woodbury to create never before seen experiential visuals for the festival’s official opening and closing galas.

Zoic’s creative team utilized the Unreal 4 game engine to to create a mythical creature that could perform live on large projection screens. Custom software developed by Zoic Studios enabled the live connection between a dancer wearing the Xsens MVN suit and the digital creature, animating the lioness creature in real-time reaction to the dancers moves. Special moves and controls were build that allowed the dancer to trigger events like particle explosions and flamethrower-like effects as she danced to the music of stars like Ne-Yo and N.A.S.A.

Watch footage from the opening gala:

The Cannes Lions opening and closing galas are the biggest events at the festival. This year’s themes were fire for the opening and ice for the closing gala.

Live Motion Capture
 To make the characters move Zoic used the Xsens MVN motion capture system to record motion data but also stream it live over a network connection. This gave them technology to create the live performance they were looking for. Due to the simple setup the dancer got on stage and started controlling the character multiple times during the galas while leaving the crowd guessing how the whole thing worked.

You can read more details on this project on Zoic’s website and Howww.