Gorgeous Japanese performance art combines dance and high-speed face mapping

Vimeo recently highlighted this stunning minute-long art collaboration called "INORI (prayer)." It comes from creative and technical director Nobumichi Asai and stars Japanese performance duo AyaBambi. According to the description:

First, the soundtrack was composed according along the theme "Life." Nobumichi Asai and Shingo Abe was inspired by the music and then made face mapping work. Aya Sato designed choreography. TOKYO completed the project by making the video work.

The music brought Asai the image of "the radioactive." The destructive force of the radioactive could cause "death," "suffering," and "sorrow." And "prayers" could overcome them. These subjects infuse AyaBambi's powerful performance. Their performance crushes and conquer black tears, skulls and the Heart Sutra. We built up the concept during the production and Abe designed animation for face mapping.

There was a big challenge in technical aspects. We realized the new mapping system that allows us to follow intense performances by using the latest 1,000 fps projector, DynaFlash and a super speed sensor. It is very new and it had not been done before. Projected images become part of their skin and they transform their faces.

At the beginning of our development, there was an issue, AyaBambi would loose freedom of performances if we accelerated the tracking speed. Asai, Yoshimura (WOW), Lecturer Watanabe and Teshima (EXVISION) explored how we could keep the tracking speed securing the freedom of performances, taking three months of trial and error to reduce a few milliseconds. And we finally developed this system.

Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the video: