The Pendulum

Can a poem change minds? Motivate people to vote?

Apparently not enough to make a difference in 2024. Thanks to the collective efforts of a small international team, we launched a goofy, anarchic, poetic thought-grenade into the world. Unfortunately it didn’t blow up, but “The Pendulum” did blow some minds.

Essentially, it’s Abraham Lincoln, come to life in the form of a giant marble statue, endorsing Kamala Harris for president—after first expressing some… thoughts on her opponent. In the form of a witty slam poetry performance:

RECOGNITION

The Pendulum was accepted into a number of film festivals, earning prizes for Best Experimental Short and Best Short Screenplay at the World Premiere Film Awards. The film was also a finalist for Best Experimental Short at the Independent Shorts Awards. It’s been written up in the poetry and art zine, The Curious Nothing and the film’s creator, Ollie Rankin, was interviewed about The Pendulum at the Spark Animation Festival.

The Making Of The Pendulum

The video was shot entirely in Sansar, a social VR/gaming platform with sophisticated user generated content tools (it’s the same platform we produced Lost Horizon and SplendourXR virtual music festivals in). The miniature Washington DC environment and CG avatars were created by our amazing team as part of a broader project called Rhymes with the Times. Rhymes with the Times is a VR immersive theatre hip-hopera. It’s an anthology of spoken word and rap performances that take place in a series of surreal worlds. Imagine the visual diversity of a season of Love, Death and Robots and the social commentary of a season of Black Mirror (though a bit less bleak), inspired as much by Dr. Dre as Dr. Seuss. Audience members must collaborate, to solve an escape room-style puzzle in each world to unlock the performance.

That larger project is ongoing, but we strongly believed that the world needed to hear from Abraham Lincoln before November 5th, 2024. This election cycle is either the last time Donald Trump is relevant or it’s the last time it’ll be legal to criticize him. So instead of waiting for the full immersive anthology to be ready to launch, we created this video of the statue of Abraham Lincoln coming to life and performing the poem in front of burning DC landmarks.

For anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of how it was all done, the city was built in the 3D authoring packages Maya and Blender, based on a combination of existing 3D datasets. Once it was brought into Sansar, the water, trees and fire/smoke elements (created in Fusion) were dressed into the scene. The animated statue of Abraham Lincoln was created using Houdini to fracture a 3D scan of the actual statue and then the broken apart pieces were rigged to the standard Sansar skeleton in Blender. Sansar features a huge motion capture “emote” library, which we leaned on to provide the body animation, while the mouth animation is handled automatically by Sansar when it detects a voice input via the microphone.

We used OBS Studio to screen capture from within Sansar, controlling the camera in real-time using an XBox-style controller. The footage was edited together and color-graded in Final Cut Pro, with animated captions created in Apple Motion. Heat haze and camera shake were also added in post.