Making of: motion capture at Animatrik
Pentakill: III: Lost Chapter, a 45-minute live, interactive album premiere for Riot Games' virtual metal band, streamed free on September 8, 2021, with the full album dropping the moment the show ended.
The show staged the album song by song, from a kinetic stadium set to the Metronome tower and flying stages for the finale. Eight musicians played Karthus, Kayle, Mordekaiser, Sona, Yorick and Olaf live.
The work split cleanly. Riot and The Mill carried most of the modeling and character work, building the band and the worlds in-engine. Wave owned the interactive and motion capture layer, with Animatrik capturing the performers in Los Angeles: full-body suits on a 70-camera OptiTrack stage, iPhone facial capture, all retargeted onto the characters in real time and rendered in Unity.
The audience did more than watch. Fans split into teams and voted at key moments, and the votes branched the show live, from whether a fan got thrown off Mordekaiser's shoulders to whether to fire a cannon at an incoming meteor. Each team saw its results fed back on screen, chat ran alongside the band, and fans' webcam feeds put them on stage next to Pentakill.
Riot owned the band and its world. I kept them aligned through regular reviews with their team plus milestone reviews with larger leadership groups, always showing the work in context.
I directed the interactive layer: the voting and branching moments, team feedback, chat, and the webcam integration that brought the crowd into the show. At its peak, 100,000 people were watching at once.