Dancing on a different stage: the balletic inspiration behind PS4's Bound
Dancer Maria Udod gives life to a new PS4 game's heroine through performance capture
It wasn't the kind of performance Maria Udod is used to.
The professional dancer based in Rotterdam, Netherlandsbut originally from Kyiv, Ukraine usually performs onstage in front of a live audience.
However, she performedfor adifferent kind ofaudience, with her every movement recorded, to help createBound, a new video game for the SonyPlayStation 4.
"Itwas awesome. And it was weird,"Udodtold CBC News of the experience.
Instead of a costume, she donned a performance-capture suitstudded with spheres, whichallowed a complicated array of cameras to track her movements from 360degrees.
Udod's movements were usedto create Bound's main character:a princess tasked by her mother to save her kingdom from a terrifying monster.
Bound is set in a starkly abstract worldseemingly constructed fromliving, breathing papercraft. The princessprances along structures that invokeM.C. Escher-like geometry and pathscomposed ofLego-esquebricks that rippleas she crosses.Thecamera contorts its point of view in kind.
It's all set to a soundtrack that mixeselectronica with classical piano, like a mashupbetween Mozart and Daft Punk.
The character moves with precision and athleticism thanks to Udod's training in ballet and contemporary dance. She's light on her feet, extendsher arms out forbalance as she crosses narrow beams, cartwheelsand rollsto gain speed before leaping across bottomless pits.
"Space-wiseas a dancer, you always have an audience in front of you, so you always try to present your best side. You know which side you're going to be looked at,"Udod said.
"But with motion capture, the cameras are all around youandit's in 3D, so you have to be perfect from every angle, which is sometimes really hard."
Bound offers a big shift from the usual kind of movement seen in similar video games. Super Mario, with his pudgy frame and stumpy limbs, bounces around the Mushroom Kingdomwith the kinetic energy of a handball and a reckless disregard for physics.
When the teambegan work on the game four years ago, the creatorsoriginally envisioned the main character as a runner, said programmerMichalStaniszewski, fromBound's Polish development team Plastic.
But when they sketched out her movements, itfelt too much like other games ofthe genre.
Then a team member showed Staniszewski a YouTubevideo of a contemporary dancer. Something in the movements evoked the aesthetic Plastic was looking for. It was decided: the princess no longer ranshe danced.
"I discovered it's very hard to find a single game where you control a dancer," hesaid.
He's right. The occasional capoeira combatant may appear in a fighting gameand digital avatars lead players through pantomimes in party games like Just Dance. But rarely has a dancer starred in a narrative-driven game like Bound.
"Maria was a perfect match because we wanted a dancer that knows the classic balletand the contemporary dance, and also [had] a very athletic style body that can make those flips and other movements," Staniszewski said.
"It was quite hard to find a dancer with all those skills."
Udod hopes Bound will "make quite a noise in the dance community" and will introduce dance and theatre to gamers who might not have had any previous interest in the art forms.
Incorporating dance intogaming changes both and pushes them into new territory, she said.
"It becomes a kind of new form of art, maybe."
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