Dear Evelyn
A man, his mum and his alter ego.
Steve Abbott reads a letter to his deceased mother Evelyn, to remind her of the life that dementia stole from her. But accompanying him on this emotional journey is his better-known self-obsessed alter ego The Sandman - entirely unaware that he is fictional. Sandman learns that he is based on Evelyn - triggering events that will change his relationship to his real-world host Steve forever.
Dear Evelyn is a NIDA X project collaboration between Writers / Directors / Performers Stephen Abbott (The Sandman) and Warren Coleman with virtual production direction, asset creation and technical support provided by Michela Ledwidge and Sarah Cashman of Mod.
Performed live at NIDA on the 28 June, 2023, Dear Evelyn utilised real-time technologies to create a poignant conversation between present-day Steven Abbott and his younger, 90s-era alter ego, The Sandman.
Process
A full-body scan was taken of Steven Abbott and imported into Unreal Engine where it was used as a template to create an avatar in Steve’s likeness. This avatar or ‘Metahuman’ was then exported out of UE to be customised to the likeness of Steve as a younger man/cult comic creation The Sandman who from 1993 to 2000 appeared on Australian national youth radio.
We worked with Maya and Houdini to ‘youngify’ the mesh, filling out parts of Steven’s face to make him appear more youthful. We extracted the texture from the scan and modified it by smoothing out any lines but making sure to keep distinctive features. From the colour texture we baked out a normal map to give the skin a more life-like appearance by adding texture such as skin pores and distinctive marks.
Sandman’s hair was created in Houdini and rendered in UE. There were no shortcuts here and creating the distinctive curls and shape of Sandman’s hair pushed us technically and creatively.
Performance
Created in UE 5.1 and upgraded to 5.2 prior to the performance, the project contained a customised Sandman mesh and groom, animation including idle face and body loops, custom OSC setup so that live and looped anim could be switched in real-time during the performance with a custom iPad app for controlling cues.
We used LiveLink Face to bring The Sandman to life, mounted on a tripod to the left of Steve so he could easily switch between himself and his alter-ego with little friction.
The result was a moving piece which integrated real and virtual elements into a live performance with the aid of cutting-edge technology that blurred the lines between fiction and reality.