2026
GLU aimed to make a name for themselves at Comic-Con. And Comic-Con wanted an experience for their visitors. My task: make an experience everyone would love while showing off what you can do with video!
Everybody who makes a cosplay is proud of what they made (and they should be!) I wanted them to be able to show off their cosplay in the world it belongs. Everybody was able to take a 6 second video of themselves in whatever world they wanted to be in! They then got a big countdown and an email with their video!
The addition of a true custom build perspective compositor was awesome. Instead of just appearing in front of a picture visitors really entered the world they wanted to be in. The warp allowed people to really stand on a rock above Hyrule, give a box to Totoro or stand lost in the backrooms.
Another nice feature was the ability to choose between both picture backgrounds and video backgrounds making the experience even more authentic and giving people a video they can really look back on and smile.
The design process happened quite quickly. With a runtime of about 10 days I had to be fast in problem solving. There were 2 main issues that I had to solve.
1: speed of media, There would have to be quite a few backgrounds people could choose between and they would switch rapidly (to browse or record multiple settings) for this the link to OBS was having a hard time when images/videos would alternate. The solution I came up with is to use a still or (automatically) downsampled version of the backplate until the recording would start.
2: green on greenscreen, at a convention like this, a greenscreen works fine until Link or Luigi shows up. A chromakey obviously can’t tell a green Luigi apart from a green background. The solution I came up with: I kept a lamp ready to slightly shift the hue of either the subject or the background, just enough to push one of them outside the key’s range. With three keys at different thresholds prepped and a light I was able to adjust on the fly showing off all cosplays! even the green ones.
For this con I had to build a custom software where visitors could pick their background and the recording would happen. This has the working title of “perspective compositor”. Here there would be a live view of what OBS sees (again a proxy so the system could keep up with rapid changes and a live key on 4k footage) The software is built on Electron and uses OBS (via a websocket) to preview, composite and record the videos. Everybody would get a 6 second recording inside their chosen background
in order to measure conversion I also created a custom weburl. gluopcomiccon.nl and gluopcomiccon.nl/mail. This way we could truly give a breakdown of the result and return on investment this project has had!
