>>71571210Animation is one of my interests, and this relates somewhat, so forgive my paragraphs.
>How would it be too much work to hire a dancer in Japan? It wouldn’t cost much eitherHiring a stand-in dancer so Koyori and Noel would know where Gura would be during the dance isn't the difficult part. The difficult part would be recording separate performances and then stitching everything together to make it feel seamless and getting everyone's positioning and timing down correctly when they're moving around each other while not actually being there together.
Back in 2022, Gura's 3D performances were very basic. Why? Because they had to be recorded remotely and sent in to Cover. This was especially the case when she was performing with others. They wouldn't move around very much and that's because the more interaction and moving, the harder it would be to make it look like they're performing together. Engineers would have to make sure they never cross each other's path and end up in the same place at the same time, for example.
Many people don't appreciate this, but Cover had to do a massive amount of work to coordinate three separate mocap recordings to make this UmiSea performance look believable back in 2022:
https://youtu.be/zQuFRSi5ebc&t=2550, but even still, they mostly danced by themselves in a line so that it would be easier to coordinate. Neither Ina nor Gura would have been able to travel to Japan at this time because of Japanese Covid travel restrictions.
Can they still do it remotely? Yes, it's possible. But the fes performance with Koyori and Noel was a lot more elaborate than her 2022 dances and it would be so much more effort hiring stand-in dancers on both sides and then timing everything perfectly. Cover isn't Pixar. They aren't going to go frame by frame and make sure everything lines up perfectly. Occam's razor says that Gura must have recorded her 5th fes performance in Japan either in June/July of last year, or some time during her 5 months absence. I don't think Gura was in Japan two weeks ago, and I don't think Cover would've waited until the last minute to record it, but I suppose that's also a possibility.
