New Motion Capture Studio Opens at Digital Design Commons

Computer-generated characters and animations have long been a part of film and promotional productions like music videos and commercials. Motion capture, a technology that records the movement of people or objects, is used widely in the entertainment industry to bring characters to life. Now Wesleyan has a space outfitted with this technology at the Digital Design Commons, which officially opened on Sept. 27 at an event with student performances and a visual effects demonstration.

The Digital Design Commons (DDC) now offers students an OptiTrack motion capture studio, complete with a dozen 3-D motion capture cameras, that can accurately track movement data within a millimeter. It also offers green screens, motion capture (mo-cap) suits with reflective sensors, and video editing space.

The interdisciplinary space has two video editing suites, a sound recording studio, a multimedia classroom, and a co-working space to help foster collaboration. Students can also check out video, photography, lighting, audio, and projection equipment for their off-site learning needs.

“The Digital Design Commons was created to deepen the knowledge of Theater, Dance, Studio Arts, and Music students within a variety of media and design disciplines,” said Pedro Bermudez, assistant professor of the practice in video and audio production. “The DDC is where they can come to gain new skills and find collaborators.”

These new additions have created the possibility for course offerings, workshops, and trainings. Bermudez and Assistant Professor of Art Ilana Harris-Babou are teaching a new course this semester, “Virtual Production: The Music Video,” where students get hands-on experience with the technology and will create a final music video project that will be screened at the end of the semester. Bermudez and Harris-Babou spent this past summer training with the technologies and creating modules for students.

“The opening of the DDC isn’t just an expansion in the range of technologies available in the arts at Wesleyan,” said Dean of Arts and Humanities Roger Grant. “It’s about unlocking the potential in our students to work in art areas that are not yet canonical or even fully understood.”

Collaborations have sprung outside of class, too, Bermudez said. The DDC Production Club started in 2022 and has taken on off-campus video projects using the space for creation, including a short documentary in the summer of 2023 on the case of Maleek Jones, a New Haven man who was wrongfully incarcerated for 30 years before he was exonerated following the film’s release. In the spring, the club brought students Tanvi Navile ’25 and Akhil Joondeph ’26 into the studio to record motion captured dances for “Love Force” by Sunny Jain—visiting scholar in the Center for the Arts—which were then activated during his performance of the work on Sept. 27.

“I’ve been really pleased to see how quickly a community has emerged in the DDC—and it’s a community of collaboration,” Bermudez said. “Where you’ll come here on a weekend, and you’ll see folks editing something together in one of our edit suites and a different team strategizing a project in our co-working lounge. It’s a free-flowing incubator of creative talent and possibility on campus.”