For the most recent HxGN Live conference in Las Vegas, we teamed up with Etage to produce a live show open experience to introduce the keynote speaker with flair.

Each year HxGN pushes to do something new that will wow the audience. This year our challenge was to design an 8,000-pixel wide video in the branded style of Hexagon while working with a professional dancer 600 miles away. We had created a “rhythmic dance” between an eloquently written script and perfectly timed animation in the past for HxGN, but producing one in real time was a different story.

With a 100′ x 16′ screen and a 64′ stage, timing and scale were naturally the biggest challenges. In order to create the dancer’s silhouette character for the video we had to do the math to incorporate the size of our dancer and the screen, then storyboard out the keyframes. Our 2D animator hand drew rough character animations of the dancer to estimate tempo and timing for the animation, then Skyped in during a shoot in San Francisco to direct the dancer’s movements on green screen while referencing our animatic.

We provided previews with and without the dancer over animation to sync up her performance before it went live. To introduce keynote speaker and Hexagon CEO Ola Rollen, we built out a 3D model based on a photo reference to implement the agency’s vision of having him float down to the stage on a balloon to add to the whimsicalness.

Considering rehearsals were set just one day prior to the event, the performance went off without a hitch and the audience loved the conference opening. With careful planning and a dialed in pre-production process, we knocked this one out of the park!