Bella Gaia
Bella Gaia – 2010
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Bella Gaia is a 40 min live performance and immersive media experience created by filmmaker and composer, Kenji Williams. I had met Kenji through mutual friends and we instantly connected on our work with immersive and performance media. I visited him in Tokyo in 2007 and got got a chance to see his show, “World Spirit”. I was testing a new Sony HD camera at the time and I filmed the Tokyo performance in HD (it was still unusual to be able to shoot any HD footage in 2007)
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Kenji moved to NYC and began development on his next show, Bella Gaia, a live musical performance with 40 min of immersive media for dome theaters. Kenji contacted me to assist help him produce some data visualization shots for Bella Gaia.
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Kenji provided me with rough global maps of timebased climate data from our partner NASA. I cleaned up some of the data and transformed the timebased data into animated sequences. Finally I wrapped the flat, equirectangular maps around 3D spheres to create “earth” simulations and animated them to rotate slightly.
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I was also provided with flat animated visualizations from from famed artist/coder, Aaron Kolbin of his amazing airline flight path visualizations that he had given us permission to use in Bella Gaia. I took Aarons’s flat animations and wrapped them onto 3D spheres.
In addition to the media design work I did on the data visualization shots for Bella Gaia I also spent 6 months working with Kenji as a consulting producer to help him develop his business plan and development strategies.
