Das Stig

Phil Stilgoe (aka Das Stig) is the CEO of world renowned motion capture studio, Centroid3D. A mocap veteran of nearly 3 decades, he and his crews have provided VFX and character pipelines for numerous award-winning movies, games and tv shows. Further to this they’ve captured musicians such as Thom Yorke, Fatboy Slim, La Roux, Matt Bellamy, and Kanye West.

After moving to Brighton in the mid-1990s, charmed by the city’s vibrant counter cultures, Phil’s personal outlook changed and he began to paint. Self-taught and inspired by the natural and digital worlds convergence, he initially painted flowers, lunar landscapes and circuit board scans. This was done primarily for personal development and therapeutic relaxation but occasionally he participated in group shows for events such as The Brighton Fringe Festival and local art fairs.

Nowadays Phil has harmonised his painting and career and enjoys using mocap pipelines as the basis for kinetic paintings and portraits. In the mocap volume he sometimes wears the suit himself and toys with reverse engineering the metaverse to a 2D form. On other occasions he invites artists and performers to muse for him, and from time to time supports the character development of their projects.

After a subject has been captured, Phil processes their kinetic marker cloud through proprietary motion capture software. Once the marker cloud is ready he selects a frame or the marker trajectories across multiple frames, for which he feels will translate best into a 2D image. He then lines up the camera angle to further embellish the original capture concept. Once all the character direction and positioning is locked down Phil turns his musing to colour and paints the scene as a whole.

In 2023 Centroid3D collaborated with the artist Jesper Erikson and their project ‘Persona’ (an interactive digital character painting – driven by Ai and performance capture) was included in Focus Art Fair at The Saatchi Gallery and was widely acknowledged as the most intriguing exhibit of the group show. As this was Phil’s first artistic participation in Ai, his learning brought about through Persona is now being scrutinised and is initiating new considerations within his painting.