Screen South Live Action Green Screen
As part of my acceptance onto Screen South’s Artist Showcase Platform, the Utopia project is now moving beyond the fixed timeframe of my Arts Council R&D and into a longer‑term phase of development, presentation, and exhibition. This platform provides a legacy context for the work—allowing the live, digital, and virtual production elements to continue evolving towards public showcase.
A recent studio session at Screen South marked an important technical step in that transition. Working with Peter and Anna, we recorded performances in the Bear,, and Hooden Horse costumes, capturing material intended not as one‑off documentation but as reusable assets for virtual production, Unreal Engine, and MetaHuman‑related workflows.
The camera master was recorded as 1080p, 25fps, 10‑bit green screen footage. Initial key and fill recordings showed drift due to a lack of genlock, so instead of reshooting, the original master was played back through the Ultimatte and re‑recorded to genlocked HyperDecks. This produced frame‑accurate key and fill outputs without needing to repeat the performance.
Once ingested into DaVinci Resolve, the footage exported cleanly as PNG sequences, perfectly aligned and ready for Unreal Engine. The result is a reliable, repeatable pipeline that supports the project’s shift from R&D into exhibition‑ready production.
Through the Artist Showcase Platform, Utopia is now being actively geared towards presentation and display—using Screen South not just as a recording facility, but as a technical foundation for future showcases and exhibitions
Alongside this, I’ve been developing the Utopia virtual space as a way of bringing these elements together and activating the environment rather than simply representing it.
Using the image sequences, and other digitaly fabricated components, the virtual space has been built up through fragments of performance, memory, and atmosphere. Aspects of Intangible heritage is re-created through visual cues, scale, lighting, and movement, allowing the space to feel inhabited rather than staged. The intention is to work with mood, decay, and residue as much as form, creating a virtual environment that echoes lived experience.
This approach leads into the next phase of experimentation, focused on recreating and activating the interior of the local nightclub La Priz using atmosphere and spatial memory as core materials.
This work has also been used as an introduction in an educational context. The Utopia material formed the basis of a lecture delivered to architecture students at UCA, focusing on regeneration, folklore, and place-making identity, with the carnivalesque running through the discussion as a recurring thread. The project was presented as an evolving process rather than a fixed outcome, linking virtual production, performance, and spatial memory.
The session was well received, and the Hooden Horse appeared as part of the event, carrying out a short performance during the lecture. Alongside the moving-image and virtual material, this helped ground the discussion in something physical and lived, reinforcing how these ideas operate not just as representations, but as active and embodied experiences.
