UC Santa Barbara

Live coding - the real-time procedural creation of audiovisual works - suggests opportunities to extend hand-drawn animation; however, existing live coding systems are incompatible with manual animation workflows. Manual input is not a primary datatype in existing live coding languages and live coding tools require using symbolic programming environments. I theorize that by applying direct manipulation to the domain of live coding, we can enable animators to create expressive mappings between hand-drawn animations and audio effects in real-time. I present Megafauna, a sketch-based system for audiovisual performance, informed by interviews with professional animators. Megafauna supports the integrated generation and control of hand-drawn animation and audio sequences by enabling animators to directly sketch mapping functions between animation frames and sound generators. I demonstrate the expressive potential of Megafauna by reproducing animated compositions from procedural and manual domains. I evaluate the opportunities of our approach for live production through an expert review of a performance piece created with Megafauna.