REAL DEAL EXPERT OPINION TECHNOLOGY
HOW BAD WEATHER USES REAL TIME GRAPHICS
ENGINES TO CREATE UNIQUE AUDIENCE EXPERIENCES In the words of Andrew Bosman, the co-founder of Cape Town-based innovative technology studio Bad Weather, the company “is tailored towards the conceptualisation, design and execution of creative technical productions.” At this year’s edition of Mediatech Africa visitors were given a hands-on demonstration of the company’s technical prowess, as Bosman and Bad Weather creative director Jonathan Bandli delivered an eye-
Emerger at Mediatech 2019 Black Box
opening presentation on Creative Workflows for Real Time and Interactive Experiences. A NOTCH ABOVE
Jonathan Bandli
Bad Weather has been synonymous with some of the country’s most exciting event productions for a number of years – including Rage Festival, Comic Con, Cotton Fest and Rocking the Daisies – but the company used the opportunity presented by Mediatech’s Black Box exhibition space to “showcase different ways in which real time content can be integrated into our current market here in Africa. The term ‘real
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time’ – in the context of graphics and animation – is often shied away from because people just assume the costs will be exorbitant.” Wanting to show that bespoke applications of this technology are not beyond the reach of South African productions, the team designed a completely interactive presentation that involved things like “beacon tracking, where a presenter would wear an ID tag and, at the back of the venue, an infra-red camera was set up to capture their X/Y position on stage – and it would lock that content into our real time animation engine.” Bosman explains that the backbone of this aspect of Bad Weather’s production offering is the innovative software Notch, described by Mark