Dance Central 2 Dance*Cam App Makes Anyone An Instant Dance Video Star
AKQA is announcing the release of Dance*Cam to promote Harmonix’s dance game sensation Dance Central 2, the sequel to the best-selling game exclusively on Kinect for Xbox 360. The Dance*Cam mobile app is designed to showcase new songs, new moves, and new features of the game while letting users create their own high-quality music video.
Building on the in-game experience, Dance*Cam lets users record themselves showing off their dance moves to select previews of some of the world’s biggest dance hits from the Dance Central 2 soundtrack. Users can then “dancify” their moves with Dance*Cam, creating a unique video remix with custom visual effects synchronized to the beat of the song. The music videos can be shared with friends on Facebook where users can challenge their friends to a dance off and have them decide who truly owns the dance floor.
Pierre Lipton, Executive Creative Director at AKQA commented, “Dance Central 2 makes you feel like a star, no matter how good you actually are at dancing thanks to the magic of Kinect and Xbox 360. Dance*Cam celebrates this by taking it one step further—it makes you look like one, cutting together a fun and polished music video on the fly.”
The creation of Dance*Cam required AKQA to develop several technological innovations to bring the creative vision to life. In an industry first, the AKQA team created a new way to render effects on a video. Using the Windows Azure platform, AKQA built a server-side version of After Effects to automate and speed the process of rendering video effects. This new process has allowed AKQA to deliver studio-quality videos cut and arranged to the beat of the song.
