Utopía Coyoacán: A Street to Remember

Create a room about the neighborhood life that has been lost (greeting shop owners by name, neighbors chatting, kids playing in the street) with four rear-projection screens and a section where visitors take part one by one.

The four screens act as the four directions of one street, as if you stood in its middle. After the cinematic, each visitor uses a touch screen to enter their name, take a photo returned in the 3D art direction, switch the time of day and send live-stream-style emoji reactions.

They finish by writing a neighborhood anecdote, which triggers a transition of volumetric clouds into a night scene where lit paper lanterns carry the visitors' stories.

I directed all 3D and coordinated assets: modular buildings, rigged and animated characters (running kids, a corn vendor), props and landmarks such as the Monumento a la Revolución, Fuente de los Coyotes, Torres de Satélite and Ángel de la Independencia. Procedural vegetation and building distribution; lighting and composition; three realtime lighting states (day, sunset, night) with seamless transitions; the emoji particle system; the volumetric cloud transition in Houdini; and the final night scene with lanterns.

The cinematic section was made by others, and the touch-screen input in TouchDesigner by WeMake; I did the output.

Open daily to the public as part of a permanent community center.