The Challenge
Remember everyone’s favourite simian cocktail server-slash-virtual musician, Murdoc Alphonce Niccals? Well, he’s back as the ‘leading ape’ in a Flux Broadcast-powered, live listening party for Gorillaz latest album, Cracker Island.
After the wild success of their previous collaboration with Smirnoff, Nexus Studios once more came to Flux to bring the unique Gorillaz experience to the world stage.
The Approach
Building on last year’s event, we moved our MCR to the Nexus offices, to create a seamless integration between their animation team and our broadcast crew.
Live streaming an animated character is always a fascinating challenge. Motion capture sensors and VR cameras let us track the movements of the actor playing Murdoc whilst he wore a specialised motion capture suit. We then linked this information directly to the Nexus team who connected the actor’s movements to a pre-animated character in a pre-created virtual space. This process creates a near-instantaneous response from movement to broadcast, which meant that Murdoc was even able to host a live Q&A session with questions asked in real time by his adoring fans.
Because the show was so music-driven, we used slick, tight camera and graphic cuts to match the upbeat feel and flow of the motion capture performance.
The Impact
Remember everyone’s favourite simian cocktail server-slash-virtual musician, Murdoc Alphonce Niccals? Well, he’s back as the ‘leading ape’ in a Flux Broadcast-powered, live listening party for Gorillaz latest album, Cracker Island.
After the wild success of their 2022 collaboration with Smirnoff, Nexus Studios once more came to Flux to bring the unique Gorillaz experience to the world stage.