Flash Animation Using Kinect

The Dead Man and the Lawyer is a short film and experiment by Nick Fox-Gieg, a Canadian animator and all-round interesting guy I've had the pleasure of getting to know over the past few months. Although this might look like relatively straight forward 2D animation, he actually made it using the Kinect and I think this opens up some exciting possibilities for creating Kinect animation.

To make the film Nick used OSCeleton to record Kinect data to an .xml file via a utility he's written called Processing Sketch. The beauty of this approach is that the motion capture information was written to an .xml file in real-time without any need for video capture. That way the animation data can be read back from .xml in Flash, tweaked and then rendered in full HD. A short tutorial and download links for all the necessary utilities and libraries you need to try this yourself can be found on Nick's website.

Nick's also a semifinalist in YouTube's NextUp competition right now. If you like his work, show him some love and vote for him.