2YR Animation 2025 Student Projects

In 2025, 2nd-year Animation students from 54404 Studio: Narrative Experimentations in Animation returned to the Data Arena as part of an ambitious year. Seven groups of 3-5 students each were accepted after an EOI process to create Data Arena projects. This year live interaction was a key criteria for all groups which presented a new challenge for the students and DA team.

Diving into Interaction

To make this process faster for each group, we developed a Python-based template to let students easily query the location of our Motion Capture system's "rigid body" trackers. Using this, students could program various events to occur when these trackers enter or leave locations in the Data Arena theatre. Some of these events might be to play or pause a video, fade out, adjust volume, trigger a sound effect and anything else imaginable.

The groups attached trackers to all sorts of props (such as fans, pot plants, branches, maps, and even a zoetrope) to create memorable experiences for the audiences.

Inductions and Initiative

Given the large number of groups in 2025, we decided to induct each group into the Data Arena. This process was lengthy but ultimately worthwhile. For each group, we ran a regular safety and introductory induction to powering-on the Data Arena which includes setting up the display, using Solo, and packing down. On top of this we ran a short introduction to Python for each group which included setting up a template script for interaction, writing bash scripts, advanced terminal concepts and more.

We were extremely impressed with how quickly each group picked up all of this new information on top of the existing challenge of creating impressive and unique animated works for the Data Arena's massive display.

A huge thank you to the 2025 groups as we look forward to more to come in 2026.