A groundbreaking creative platform called Impulse officially launches on March 10, aiming to modernize how production teams (including those on Broadway) develop, budget and stage large-scale choreography. The software was developed by Pulse & Pixel, a creative technology studio co-founded by director-choreographer Brandon Powers and creative technologist Whitt Sellers. Impulse is a specialized interface for Unreal Engine, the real-time 3D tool famously used by Epic Games for “Fortnite” and by major film studios for Disney and Marvel productions.
Powers, whose background includes working as the creative assistant to Andy Blankenbuehler on his Tony Award-winning choreography to the musical “Bandstand,” created the tool with Sellers, an authorized Unreal instructor specializing in performance capture. Impulse allows a single choreographer to record their own movement via motion capture and instantly apply that data to an entire digital ensemble. During a demonstration of the software for Broadway News, Powers explained that the project emerged from his time as a Lincoln Center Collider Fellow, where he sought to sharpen his technical skills to become more independent in the digital space.
“I’ve always wanted the ability to imagine work at a larger scale. So many of my ideas die in my camera roll because it’s just me dancing alone in a studio,” Powers said. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if I had a tool that helped me remember and record those early impulses, and then also envision them on scale?’”
