Smartsuit Pro Contest Winner: Mark Louis Spark

If you follow Rokoko, you already know that a large part of our mission is to get motion capture into the hands of creators who wouldn’t otherwise have access. With traditional motion capture systems costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and requiring extensive technical expertise, we provide a more intuitive experience at a fraction of that cost every day. On one special day this year, we wanted to do even more. To coincide with the digital arts conference FMX, we put on a competition with a simple entry process: tell us what project you’d use a Smartsuit Pro for, and we’ll give one lucky winner a complete mocap solution for no cost at all! In 10 days, we got nearly 400 entries, with some incredible projects we had never imagined before. Among many others, we heard from insectologists, VR simulators of ancient civilizations, innovative service projects, and an African space opera! The creativity brewing out there blew us away, and it was a tough task to pick one from this outstanding group. One entry really did stand out to us though:

“Part of my goal is to show the world what 1 person can do with CGI.” wrote our winner, Mark Louis Spark. “I will help demonstrate how your suit can help propel content creators like myself to move forward with their dreams.”

"Everything you see on screen normally is done by teams of 100 people or a whole department of specialized people, and I was able to do it as a single artist."

We could hardly believe that all of this animation of near cinematic quality was done by one person. Inspired by what Mark had already accomplished on his own, and also by the mocap possibilities we saw in his trailer, we agreed that he would be a fantastic representative of what individual animators can do, even without big studio budgets. With the right tools and the willpower, anything is possible. Mark clearly has the willpower, and we want to help him get the tools.

The reason we started Rokoko is because we experienced firsthand that animation is the hardest part of any production. Mark’s experience confirmed this: “At the moment, the biggest thing slowing me down is animation. Unreal mo-cap obtained from the Unreal store mixed with animation I do manually can only do so much,” he explained. We’re looking forward to meeting Mark in person at SIGGRAPH 2018 to give him his Smartsuit Pro, and to hear more about his plans. We’ll keep you updated! In the meantime, get tickets to SIGGRAPH and meet up with us and Mark there, or subscribe to our newsletter so you can be updated about any future contests! No better way to close than to hear from Mark himself, who has a few words on his project and a preview of what’s next. We hope Mark’s story will inspire more of you to venture into ambitious projects, and we look forward to supporting you.