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Dancers Melt Through Space in a Stunning CGI Experiment

A Korean animator bends time and space like Kurt Vonnegut's all-knowing aliens.
Screencap via Vimeo

The grace and elegance of dance meets mind-blowing CGI in a new video called Great Dancer, from animator Jaeho Yu. The South Korean motion graphics artist makes his subjects digitally flow like water as they move across the stage, drawing on a flawless execution of key frame animation—a technique vital to Game of Thrones' epic Battle of the Bastards—to stretch out the dancers' limbs through space and time.

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The effect is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians, which is where the video gets really trippy. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut imagines an alien race that could see the entirety of time, so they "don't see human beings as two-legged creatures… They see them as great millipedes—with babies' legs on one end and old people's legs at the other." Thanks to Yu's animation, the dancers' movements trail behind them in space like the many-legged creatures imagined by Vonnegut. As in Eyal Gever's Trace Simulation, a 3D-printed sculpture which captures the movement of a kick to the chest, Great Dancer makes us conscious of space-time's weirdness. Even more stoner weirness comes from a scene where Yu highlights the dancer's bones. Who doesn't remember the first time they conceived, "There's a skeleton inside me?"

Check out Yu's video in full below, and get ready to say, "woah."

See more of Jaeho Yu's work on his website.

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