Quarter Strike - Ten Drum 25th Anniversary Performance

A repertory stage, experimental technology.

For Ten Drum Art Percussion Group’s Quarter Strike, this production introduces, for the first time, a stage design that combines real-time computation with an animation workflow, integrating percussion, physical performance, and stage imagery into a visual system capable of responding to the live performance.

The animation design begins with each piece’s background, rhythmic structure, movement focus, and lighting relationship, arranging how the visuals enter and withdraw across different sections, how they carry emotion, and how they extend the visual space of the stage.

The production combines real-time audio detection and analysis, audio-data conversion, and AI-based movement recognition with skeletal tracking. The intensity of each drumbeat, the progression of rhythm, and the performers’ movements become the basis for generating animation, allowing the visuals to translate the force of the live performance into moving images. The AI motion-capture workflow also lowers the barrier of traditional motion-capture production and improves the efficiency of stage animation.

The centrally designed screen was considered from the early planning stage as a core condition of the overall stage space. Through the perspective created by the audience’s viewing position and the use of spatial illusion, it creates a sense of depth extending toward the back of the stage, as if opening a new spatial dimension beyond the original stage.

The visual content steps back when the focus needs to return to the performers, and becomes the main visual interface when emotion and narrative need to move forward. This design transforms the sonic and bodily qualities of percussion into a visible theatrical experience, while proposing a new visual translation of traditional drum performance in a contemporary performing-arts context.