Gadzooks Studio, a Manchester-based stop motion animation studio founded by animation directors Steve Boot and Haydn Secker, has been sharing some really delightful digital puppetry experiments on Instagram. They’re building a Blender-based pipeline that utilizes TouchDesigner, which lets artists and technologists build interactive animation systems without writing traditional code.
What they've shared so far is pretty impressive:
What Gadzooks is doing here is using TouchDesigner to feed their live performance in to Blender, which acts as the character/animation environment. This allows them to create digital puppets that respond to a performer in real time: facial expressions, head turns, timing, reactions, and little bits of character business.
TouchDesigner, created by Toronto-based Derivative, is a big part of Gadzooks’ not-so-secret sauce (although, to their credit, they’ve been sharing much of their workflow on Instagram). TouchDesigner is able to take a variety of live inputs - everything from camera footage to audio, MIDI, sensors, controllers, or just about anything else that outputs a signal - and use that input to control a character in real time without traditional hand-keyed animation. It’s a more sophisticated version of what I was trying to build with Panda Puppet many years ago - a way to make it possible to use almost anything to perform a digital character.
It’s a really great example of the advantage digital performance has over AI-based prompting: the immediacy of puppetry, with the flexibility and control of a digital animation pipeline. The best of both worlds.
I'm excited to see what others might be able to do with TouchDesigner, as well as what else Gadzooks is working on. To keep up-to-date with them, follow Gadzooks.Studio on Instagram!
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