The (augmented reality) elephant in the ballroom

TVBEurope gets an exclusive insight into how the Strictly Come Dancing graphics, lighting and audio teams have introduced augmented reality in this years series.

By Jenny Priestley

Published: December 10, 2020

TVBEurope gets an exclusive insight into how the Strictly Come Dancing graphics, lighting and audio teams have introduced augmented reality in this year's series.

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It may be 16 years old, but this year's Strictly Come Dancing has been as popular as ever. Viewers have taken to social media to express their joy at the show that's brought sparkle back to our screens, and helped lift everyone's spirits.

It's not been easy to bring the ballroom back in the year of the pandemic, and the production team deserve all the plaudits they've received for their hard work to get the show on air. But rather than sit on their laurels, Strictly's production team have been particularly innovative by bringing augmented reality into the mix. From the racing cars in week one, to the elephant that appeared during Bill Bailey's Quickstep, augmented reality has featured every week during the live shows.

The use of AR has been a real team effort, involving both the lighting and audio teams, as well as companies, Mo-Sys and Potion Pictures. While this year is the first time AR has been employed in the show, it's something the team has been considering for a while. We've previously used perspective in the floor to create the illusion that the dancers are standing on top of a lighthouse or wedding cake, or skyscraper, explains Potion Pictures' managing director David Newton, who also serves as the show's graphics designer.

That's been really effective but the big drawback is you can't move the camera. Likewise, we've had concepts where the production team wanted to place something in the scene, and we've done chess pieces, falling glitter and bats, but again you can't move the camera. Using AR was a chance to expand on those concepts and bring everything together a little bit more.

Newton was asked by Strictly's producers to look into the possibility of AR, and chose to use Unreal Engine as they were already starting to use it for real time rendering. Mo-Sys's name kept coming up in relation to AR and camera tracking, and Epic Games said Mo-Sys have a plugin that works great with their software and we were comfortable with using Unreal so it all sort of added up.

Everyone involved came together for a demo day at BBC Studioworks' Studio D at BBC Elstree Centre. They already had the little reflective stickers in the ceiling of Studio D that are critical to the tracking system so it was a logical place to do the demo, explains James Uren, technical director at Mo-Sys.

Once the producers were happy with the demo and test days, planning got underway for the series proper. Eagle-eyed viewers will have noticed AR has featured in at least two dances each week. Amazingly, the planning for each dance only begins days before we see it on screen. We pretty much always start on a Monday. We'll have a meeting about it the previous Friday, and then on Monday we'll start the work for that week's show, says Newton.

One thing we were really keen on from the beginning was that the technology shouldn't drive the concepts and the creatives. We wanted the creative team to come to us with the concepts in the same way they have previously done with the screen graphics. During the demo day we demonstrated some of the things that they could possibly do. Most weeks it's very much led by the creative team. The show's creative director Jason Gilkison and producers that work with him come to us with a concept and then it's up to us to try and make that work in AR.

Using AR looks great on screen, but there's always the possibility that the couples will end up dancing right through it. How do the team ensure that doesn't happen? Newton cites Clara Amfo's recent jive, which featured an AR record player. The first draft of the record player had it much further down stage, we thought the original starting position was going to be camera right. So we sort of changed how a record player works to actually have the arm on the other side. But it all changed, and it went further upstage and there were a few more meetings about where it was going to go, what colour it should be, what side the arm was going to be, how many letters of complaint we would get if the records spun in the wrong direction, he laughs.

One of the good things about using Unreal is that it's a real-time renderer so you can make those changes quickly. It'd be great to have all the information uploaded at the beginning of the week and that not change but the realistic thing, especially this year on a show like Strictly, is that it's a creative process and everything is going to continue to develop during the week. Using Unreal lets us react to that, without it taking 12 hours to render. At this point I should pay tribute to my colleague Joe Phillips, who's the lead designer at Potion Pictures and has done all the Unreal work on Strictly this series.

As well as the graphics, Strictly's lighting is a key component of the augmented reality employed in the show. David Bishop, the show's lighting director, says it's been interesting to explore the relationship between lighting and AR. In my mind there are two routes with AR, you have to either make some

LINK:	https://www.tvbeurope.com/production-post/the-augmented-reality-elepha...
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