RAIN at Fulldome UK

immersive-me’s Bertie Sampson, Composer Matthew Ferraro, and Choreographer/Dancer Nikki Watson combined their unique talents to electrify Fulldome UK in Plymouth.

After being introduced, immersive-me Co-Founder Bertie Sampson and Composer Matthew Ferraro began work on a collaborative project, knowing nothing other than the fact that they wanted to work together. Ferraro showed Sampson compositions he’d been working on based on the theme of water and, as Sampson recalls, they immediately captured his imagination. Collaborating between Los Angeles and London, they slowly started to form an idea.

The team found themselves drawn to an all-encompassing space and strived to use a projection dome. Sampson wanted the visuals to maintain an organic and human feeling, so he contacted Choreographer and Dancer Nikki Watson, with whom he’d worked before on motion-capture projects. Once they had a direction, they reached out to the organisers of Fulldome UK, a Plymouth-based festival dedicated to all things spherical, and secured a performance slot at the Market Hall Dome.

The creative team worked separately on their individual pieces for the most part. Just a day before the show, Sampson and Watson met to test the motion capture and fine-tune its relationship to the visuals. To achieve this, they used a Perception Neuron suit feeding directly into their developed Notch Blocks. Sampson controlled a few published parameters on the Blocks in TouchDesigner with a Launch Control XL.

They used TouchDesigner as their media server, running Notch Blocks powered by an NVIDIA 3090 GPU. The performance was an immediate hit that refreshed and illuminated its audience enough to motivate the team to continue expanding the project and looking for new ways to present it.