Over the summer of 2024, I worked with two of my favorite collaborators, Dave Tenent and John Syzonenko, to iterate through a dynamic, timeline-based video booth to replicate moments from Kodansha-produced anime classics. From Akira, we would create a video booth where guests could insert themselves into the "Akira Slide," and from Attack On Titan, we would create a video booth that could put guests into the scene where they would stand in for Titans.

Folks would need instructions from a guided screen and an easy delivery system so they could get their video downloaded to their phones.

Initially, we tried to optically reproduce the Akira Slide with projection in the backdrop and a static bike position. We came up with a pretty good methodology to match the optical motion, but the framing needed to be adjusted to avoid jitter and frame swimming. While this method allowed for the trick to be almost entirely in-camera, it changed the frame positioning so it didn't meet the requirements of the creative brief. Point being – it was cool, but it wasn't right.

Through workshopping the test at scale, we ended up doing a live-key augmented with creative masking and AI segmentation. Historically, we've never done a live-key with projection providing the chroma because of shadow issues and bad keys – but we were able to solve this with an intense Touch patch and some excellent lighting. While the original plan didn't work, this certainly did, and we were proud of the results.

The trick for Titan would need to be almost entirely in-camera, as there is a vertical camera move that had foreground practical scenic and therefore parallax shift. Integrating the motor for the camera into our automated show system was complex, but Dave and John figured out a good solution!

Working with the really great folks from Hornet and our friends at Ghost Corporeal, we developed a run of show for both booths and an automation system that we pretty much set-and-forgot for a month. Nice!

Special thanks to Ghost's Alex Koch for standing in for quite a lot of our R&D 👍

Project documentation in the gallery was provided by John and me. We forgot to capture the confidence monitor GUI. It was dope. Whoops!