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PRISONCORE! 

Media Design

Presented at Exponential Festival 2025 at the Brick, Gestating Baby 2024 at The Brick, and LPAC’s 2024 Rough Draft Festival
Art & Tech Direction, Character Design, Photography, and Poster Design
Written by kanishk pandey and directed by Rachel Gita Karp
 PRISONCORE! is a multimedia show that places the audience as prisoners within a panopticon to examine the impact of an-always-watching eye. Focusing on the interaction between two characters, Lucky, the sole guard of the panopticon prison, and Rain, a VTuber running a blackjack table online, the show touches on aspects of unrelenting observation, power, and helplessness.

PRISONCORE! was developed with design and tech in mind. Our first two shows were spent workshopping the technical aspects, with the collaboration of director Rachel Gita Karp and playwright kanishk pandey, and our most recent show at Exponential Festival, we were able to bring on projection designer Whimzee Hanna to explore a complex mutiple projectors and camera system to place the audience on both sides of a “panopticon” set piece that transforms into a Vtuber blackjack studio in the second act. Everything was live media and cued live using a combination of QLab, OBS Studio and Isadora.

From the start of workshopping the play, I developed the character design and facial mapping for Rain’s virtual avatar using VRoid Studio and VSeeFace. Once Rain’s avatar could move along with the actress’s facial movements and voice, she was brought into OBS Studio where the actress herself could cue transitions between going live, a tip-to-talk, or standby with her cameras off. The blackjack game design and scenic transitions were handled by Isadora, including turning on a separate webcam that showed the actual actress inside the set we projected on at one point in the play. In addition to art direction and technical design, I created the branding, collaborated on set and costume design, and ran the social media marketing for each of the three productions. We were also really proud to run a book drive to support people incarcerated in prison.


View Full Play Recording
Act 1 - Lucky plays blackjack with Rain. Each game UI overlay was cued live on top of Rain’s video outputs
Act 1 - Lucky talks to Rain in a tip-to-talk, but accidentally sees Rain’s real face in a “glitch” moment. We achieved this by using a third camera that turns on and momentarily takes over the Vtuber window
Transition between Act 1 and 2, where Lucky climbs into the set while the lights go out, and pulls back the curtains we project on to reveal Rain inside
The preshow video we project onto the set to calm our prisoner audience members


Poster design for Exponential Festival
Merch stickers I designed
Design printed on Rain’s jacket

The behind-the-scenes program that controlled facial mapping so Rain moved along with our actress’s movements
Our actress could press specific key commands that would make Rain smile or look sad whenever players lost in blackjack

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