T2 Studios puts digital graphics in high gear for events - KansasCity ...

On a Saturday night in April, attendees of a Nelson-Atkins Museum gala awaited dessert in a Bloch Building space while long expanses of walls pulsated with the movement of color, graphic imagery and thousands of bouncing balls.

At a fashion benefit for Truman Medical Center the same weekend, the Bartle Hall Grand Ballroom turned into a rhythmic explosion of asymmetrical images and sounds as models stepped deliberately up and down the runway.

And this month, in Easton, Pa., a room inside a new visitors center at the Crayola headquarters is being transformed into an interactive display where children can expend energy turning digitally animated crayon figures into dancing machines.

Welcome to the world of digital design at T2 Studios, a Kansas City video production firm. In the last few years, the firm and its so-called Experience Lab have gained a growing reputation for creating what are called immersion experiences.

In a world of way-too-much stuff passing before our eyes, what all these flashy sights are about is an elevated form of marketing.

?It?s connecting a brand with customers through an experience,? said Garrett Fuselier, the unit?s creative leader. ?It?s memorable.?

And in marketing, he added, brochures and rectangular screens are pass?, and, echoing a maxim from Don Draper of ?Mad Men,? ?the most effective thing you can do is to create a memory.?

For Teri Rogers, T2?s founder and president, the motion-graphics and experiential design coming out of Fuselier?s department have helped expand the company?s business beyond Kansas City.

?Usually what these guys do has never been done before,? Rogers said recently in the company?s brick-walled, loft-like Crossroads Arts District headquarters. ?It?s allowed us to go to Boston and Chicago, and soon to New York and actually compete.?

In St. Louis, the unit helped create a shopping mall installation promoting healthy-heart activities for a hospital?s cardiac unit. Using a Microsoft Kinect device, visitors could swipe their arms in the air and create ad hoc art works on a large heart-shaped screen. The art was captured digitally, printed out and posted on a website.

?This was so successful,? Fusilier said, ?that the ad agency that came up with it paid us to come up with a version to pack up and send to any hospital in the country.?

T2 launched into the experience-event field in a big way in 2011. Working with Harvest Productions and other party planners, the design company staffers spent months devising a two-and-a-half-hour video dazzler for the opening of the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

As VIP revelers dined, graphic projections from the Bartle ballroom streamed in the air over their heads and across the street onto the metallic skin of the center?s north facade. Inside, gigantic images of dancers spanned more than 700 feet of wall space 20 feet high around three sides of the dining room. Music controlled the look and feel of computer-generated graphics.

?The computing power that that animation took was quite significant,? said Bill Hartnett, vice president for development at Harvest, a longtime collaborator with T2.

At the recent Dot to Dot event for the Nelson, Fuselier and Daniel Goggin worked with photographer Nick Vedros, his filmmaker son Nicholas Vedros and Harvest to wrap the event in a celebration of the museum?s 80th birthday, first with one traditional-style video, then with a 3-minute visual blast that earned a standing ovation.

Event chairwoman Mary Lou Brous, with Nick Vedros, the executive creative director on the project, had brainstormed an idea to fill walls with images from the Nelson. Brous had suggested a polka-dot theme. Vedros took it three-dimensionally into a cascade of 2,500 ping-pong balls.

Take2?s role was to edit the video, directed by the younger Vedros, and take the visuals to another level. The effort involved not only piecing together the images but visualizing how they?d look coming out of 14 projectors. Fuselier upended a linear scheme by splicing, flipping and tessellating, or creating a skewed mosaic of the images.

?It totally energized the piece,? Brous said. ?The response was beyond anything I could imagine.?

As a video production firm, the company generally works with ad agencies and other production companies around town.

?Teri?s team is always good,? Vedros said. ?I believe in her creative team. She?s first on my list.?

Because of its technical expertise, the lab agreed to toy with a tiny interactive device not yet on the market. The Leap Motion Controller will allow desktop computer users to create animations or control actions on their screen by moving fingers and hands ? not on a keyboard but in the air.

Like the big guys at Google, the code writers at T2 are exploring possible applications for the device: Perhaps something involving musical instruments, perhaps something else.

?It?s up to people like us to think about where you can go with this,? said Ben Vanasse, lead programmer and technical director. ?Until we see how people react to it, we won?t know how powerful it is.?

In recent weeks, Vanasse and colleagues have been developing an interactive experience for Crayola, which is preparing to open a new visitors center at its headquarters. Again using Kinects, the room, when it opens Memorial Day weekend, will give as many as six children at once the chance to dance and jump in front of a long wall, every move mirrored by the colorful characters facing them.

?You have to make sure the character looks good,? Vanasse said as a colleagues and a visitor waved their arms and moved their feet. ?A move is sculpted, and the emphasis is on the quality of the image.?

Screens full of code scrolled before Vanasse as programmer Joseph Sullivan, at the next screen, tracked the animated crayons? feet. The goal is to give the crayons? faces and limbs human-quality movements.

?Kids want to jump over and over,? Sullivan said.

Vanasse: ?That?s true.?

Source: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/05/19/4241723/t2-studios-puts-digital-graphics.html

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