“My Time is Now” is an ambitious attempt to create an interactive music video for the release of the album “The Things You Forget” by Dan Korn – recorded here at Cosy Studios.
The experience generates a procedural city, along with a flock of autonomous agents, or “proles” (In reference to the novel 1984 by George Orwell). Each whom have their own set of goals and drives, inspired by Craig Reynolds famous flocking algorithms.
Characters driven by DepthKit video sequences, captured on a kinect are also agents in the simulation and can interact with the other proles. The main protagonist (Dan) sets out on an adventure through the city, knocking over various proles that stand in his way. Mores the pity for them because they’re inhenrantly attracted to want to be around him!
Because Dan’s character can be viewed from all angles, two layers of walkcycle (front & back) had to be recorded individually and synced up.
Later on in the sequence, the DepthKit characters move to the roof of their building and the proles are lifted up in a swarm around Dan, seeking his guidance to be elevated to a higher state of conciousness.
Dan himself reflects in the song on his previous self, while the experience illustrates his state now, as he destroys an old piano at the end; a symbol of discarding his old self.
Technical Challenges
The sequence posed a lot of technical challenges.
The city itself had to be generated and then converted to a set of instanced meshes in order to hold reasonable performance, whilst also building a data structure to represent the buildings as obstacles for the flocking alogorithm, and provide sensible mapped goals for the proles to seek out when wandering the city.
Each prole and DepthKit character had to have a statemachine associated with them to keep track of their states & the boid alogorithm optimised to consider the relationship between each of these.