Digital Puppetry

What is Digital Puppetry?

Real Time Computer Animation

Human Input to Give motion to specialized

3-D Models

Motion Capture

Affiliated Terms

Virtual Puppetry

Real-Time Computer Animation

New Media Puppetry

Digipuppets

Interactive Character Control

Affiliated Fields

Virtual Reality

Digital Ventriloquism

Traditional Puppetry

Motion Capture

History (prehistory)

Puppetry as a continuous 30,000 year old

art

Shadow puppetry

String Puppetry

Marionettes

Digital Puppets are pixel and computer

reiterations of traditional forms.

History (Prehistory)

Gordon Craig, the Über-marionette

“The ideal actor envisioned by the designer Gordon Craig he or she

would be an egoless 'super-puppet', wholly at the bidding of the play's

director. He insisted that „acting is not an art‟ and believed that actors

should represent a character's emotions by „feeling as little of them as

is necessary‟.” http://www.theater-dictionary.com/definition/uber-

marionette.html

Dawn Of A New Age

Lee Harrison III. animated figures using analog circuits and a cathode ray

tube. Harrison rigged up a body suit with potentiometers and created the

first working motion capture rig, animating 3D figures in real-time on his

CRT screen. He made several short films with this system, which he called

ANIMAC

Waldo C. Graphic

,

created in 1988 by Jim Henson and Pacific

Data Images

Types of digital puppetry

Waldo puppetry A digital puppet is controlled onscreen by a puppeteer

who uses a telemetric input device connected to the computer. The X-Y-Z axis movement of the input device causes the digital puppet to move correspondingly. A keyboard, mouse or joystick-like device is sometimes used in place of a telemetric control.

Motion capture puppetry (mocap puppetry) or Performance Animation An object (puppet) or human body is used as a physical

representation of a digital puppet and manipulated by a puppeteer. The movements of the object or body are matched correspondingly by the digital puppet in real-time.

Machinima A production technique that can be used to perform

digital puppets. Machinima involves creating computer-generated imagery (CGI) using the low-end 3D engines in video games. Players act out scenes in real-time using characters and settings within a game and the resulting footage is recorded and later edited in to a finished film.

Mike The Talking Head 1988

The system developed by deGraf/

Wahrman to perform Mike Normal was

later used to create a representation of

the villain Cain in the motion

picture RoboCop 2, it might be the first

example of digital puppetry being used to

create a character in a full length motion

picture.

Design Process

Step 1: The Idea

Step 2: Conceptual Design

Step 3: Puppet Building

Step 4: Digital Painting

Step 5: Rigging

Step 6: Animation and Rendering

Web-ography

http://www.delicious.com/poemsparrow/dig

italpuppetry