Game of Thrones – Sword Experience Innovative Campaign wins Vega Digital Awards

The Brief About the Innovative Campaign

CIVIC challenged Red Paper Heart to create an art installation inspired by the HBO series, Game of Thrones. They were asked to convey Arya Stark’s journey in becoming an assassin, starting with her wooden training sword from Season 1 of the series.

Arya’s character and image changed dramatically over the last 5 seasons. Early on, they became interested in the idea of fans changing their own image by their sword training.

In the experience, fans get their profile photographed in a special photo studio, then step on stage to wield a replica of Arya’s training sword. Facing a 10×10 foot projection, fans swing the sword to try and hit targets. Once hit, the targets spill artwork onto the canvas including blades, dragon claws, raven feathers and direwolf fur. As the artwork grows and becomes dense, fans reveal a portrait of themselves which is a formation from the elements of the show.

With a unique generative art system, it translates the physics of sword play into an artful self portrait. To accomplish this, thy embedded wooden swords with wireless gyroscope and accelerometer sensors that measure the trajectory and velocity of each swing. As the user slices the on-screen targets, projected artwork spills out based on the swing. Each piece of art rotates, scales and moves in the particular way the user swings their sword. The custom graphics engine, written in the C++ framework Cinder, blends both 2d and 3d visual elements- an inspiration by Game of Thrones. The user’s own photo masks this 3D world, building up an artwork that fills in their own portrait. Finally, they upload the final artwork to a server and it is available for sharing the moment a user steps off stage.

About Games of Thrones

Game of Thrones is an American fantasy drama television series created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. It is also an adaptation of A Song of Ice and Fire, George R. R. Martin’s series of fantasy novels, the first of which is A Game of Thrones. At first, it is filmed in Belfast and elsewhere in the United Kingdom, Canada, Croatia, Iceland, Malta, Morocco, Spain, and the United States. HBO premieres the series in the United States on April 17, 2011, and its sixth season ends on June 26, 2016. The series renew for a seventh season, premiering on July 16, 2017, and will conclude with its eighth season in 2018 or 2019.

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