WOW x TOKYO x AyaBambi – INORI (Prayer)
2017 · Directed by Eiji Tanigawa
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Best comments
1.“I guess this is how getting your brain hacked in the future feels.”
More comments
- 2.“I'm studying 3D animation and VFX – this technique is called projection mapping! The white dots on their faces are motion-tracking points, and all those devices are projecting the images onto their faces in real time.”
- 3.“Even scarier than this video: imagining the frosty vibe between the two of them, who had already broken up by then.”Translated from Japanese
The story
A projector running at 1,000 frames a second, aimed at a dancer's face. INORI (Prayer) is a 2017 art piece out of Tokyo where animation is mapped straight onto the faces of the dance duo AyaBambi while they move hard and fast, and the images cling to the skin like makeup that won't stop changing. Black tears run. Skulls surface. Faces split apart and turn into agonized Noh masks, and the Heart Sutra, the Buddhist scripture, shows up on skin.
Nobumichi Asai of the studio WOW started it by calling in director Eiji Tanigawa of TOKYO, AyaBambi and the Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. The music came first, written around Tanigawa's theme of life. Asai heard radioactivity in it: destruction, death and sorrow, and the chance to rise above them. That's the prayer. Aya Sato choreographed.
The trick is speed. The lab's DynaFlash projector fires 1,000 frames a second, and the team spent about three months of trial and error shaving milliseconds off the face tracking so the dancers could move freely without the picture sliding off. Seventy-two seconds of the future, with a little dread mixed in.
