Somehow in the busiest year of my life I found the time to write, animate, and perform a sequel to a piece I'd done a couple of years earlier. The first version was fun but pretty modest. This one I wanted to scale up properly.
The Game 2.0 was a live performance and animation hybrid. Me on stage, choreographed to a video playing behind me, with a loose narrative threading through a mashup of every video game popular at the time. Flappy Bird, Mario, Tetris, Piano Tiles, Doodle Jump, Candy Crush, the list goes on. The fun part of the design was building cross-game interactions, so something from one game could fly out and crash into another. Outrageous, very stupid, and a whole lot of fun.
My youth leader built a custom canvas screen for the performance, a couple of metres tall and five or six metres wide. We rear-projected onto it so we could get the biggest playing surface possible in the room without a projector blocking anything from the front. That screen made the whole piece feel huge.
We performed it for a youth group of about sixty to eighty people. The cross-game gags got the laughs I was hoping for, but the real crowd pleaser was the finale: a surprise return of a friend we hadn't seen in a while, a scheme the two of us cooked up together. The response at the end was the best part of the night.
Honestly, I still don't know how I pulled this off that year. So glad I did though.
