Digital Puppeteer Mario Mey

This is a new demo reel for Argentinian digital puppeteer Mario Mey that shows off his digital characters performing en Español at various live events (his character Pinokio 3D was mentioned here back in 2010) . He creates and performs his "Marionetas Digitales" (digital puppet) characters using Blender 3D and PureData, a real-time graphical dataflow programming environment for audio, video, and graphics.

You can see Mario at work and get a look at his production process in this video, however it was recorded in Spanish.

Digital Felix The Cat from the 1980s

I only discovered this recently while doing some research for PuppetVision: The Movie (see previous post)...did you know that Felix The Cat: The Movie was one of the first films to use motion capture technology to create a computer generated character?

This digital Felix head was performed by Eren Ozker (the primary female puppeteer during the first season of The Muppet Show) and is a pioneering example of digital puppetry. Felix The Cat: The Movie was made in Europe in 1987, which means that it predates even Waldo C. Graphic. "Digital Felix" might be the very first digital puppet to ever appear in a feature film!

How Waldo Worked

Take a look at the origins of digital puppetry technology with this clip from Secrets of the Muppets, in which Jim Henson explains how Waldo C. Graphic - one of the very first digital puppetry characters - was created and performed. 

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More Skrumps Stuff

This is kind of old news, but there's some new-ish content featuring the Henson Company's digital puppetry characters The Skrumps (see previous post) available on Yahoo Kids. The new material includes four new Skrumps videos, ecards and a few other downloadable goodies. Also, The Muppet Newsflash recently posted an interview with Victor Yerrid, who is one of the puppeteers working on The Skrumps.

Brian Windsor wins Innovation Award for Digital Puppetry

This is just a quick post to say congratulations to Brian Windsor, who won the Puppeteers of America Jim Henson Award for Innovation for his work in digital puppetry at the recent Puppet Rampage 2007 festival in St. Paul, MN. Awarded by Puppeteers of America biannually, The Jim Henson Award for Innovation is given to recognize "innovation in puppetry that is technological, dramaturgical or collaborative in nature".

Brian and I held an impromptu demo of Brian's impressive digital puppetry work and the still work-in-progress Panda Puppet system at Puppet Rampage last week and I got to know him a bit. He's a great guy who's doing really great work and his award is well-deserved.

Congrats Brian!

Digital Puppeteer Interview: Julianne Buescher

The Muppet Newsflash has an interview with puppeteer Julianne Buescher, who specializes in performing with the Henson Company's HDPS animatronic/digital puppetry control system. In the interview Julianne talks about the work she's done on a variety of Jim Henson company projects over the years, including performing digital puppet characters.

You can also learn more about Julianne on The Muppet Wiki.

One Puppeteer's Journey From Puppets to Pixels

The fence that divides puppetry and animation is a pretty low one and lots of artists like Phil Vischer, Karen Prell, Mike Quinn, and Nate Pacheco (to name just a few) find themselves jumping from one side to the other mid-career and Craig Crane is another of those puppeteer/animator hybrids.

Craig started his career in the 1990s doing a lot of ground-breaking work in real-time animation and performance capture as well as conventional puppeteering on various projects in England, France and Isreal, but these days he's an animator for Double Negative, a British effects shop. Craig discussed his transition from puppetry to animation in a two part interview with 3D World Magazine last fall (click to read part one and part two).

Craig seems to be pretty happy in the animation world these days, but I really hope he keeps a hand (no pun intended) in the puppetry world. He really is a brilliant puppeteer; you can check out is Real-Time animation demo reel above and his preschool puppet reel is a lot of fun too.

Cross-posted from The PuppetVision Blog.

Nintendo - A Digital Puppetry Pioneer

Most people don't know this, but Nintendo is something of a pioneer in the field of digital puppetry. Since 1994 they have been using a system they call MIRT ("Mario in Real-Time") to have many of their iconic characters like Mario appear at trade shows and in-store promotional events. The clip of MIRT in action above shows everyone's favourite Italian plumber bashing Sony, doing a Jack Nicholson impersonation and re-enacting a scene from Star Wars.

The earliest version of MIRT was a facial tracking system that ran on a Silicon Graphics super computer, but over the years the technology has been refined to the point where puppeteer Charles Martinet (the voice of Mario, Luigi and many of Nintendo's other characters) is able to work off a laptop at home and virtually perform characters all over the word. Charles briefly discusses his career as Mario & the gang in this short interview with GT.tv from last summer.

Digital Bush puppet

Former Baltimore Sun editorial cartoonist Kevin "Kal" Kallaugher has developed an interactive digital puppet of George W. Bush in collaboration with the University of Maryland, Baltimore County's Imaging Research Center. His creation was publicly unveiled at Baltimore's Walters Art Museum last night as part of a show of his work called Mightier Than The Sword. The goal of the project is to use digital puppetry as a form of editorial cartooning at a time when newspaper circulation is falling and the public is increasingly turning to other forms of media for political commentary.

Kal will be demonstrating the puppet again publicly as part of his "Afternoon with Kal" lecture at the museum June 25th. Tickets are $5-10 plus the price of museum admission.

Putting puppetry (and machinima) on the map

Just over a week ago I started a Frappr map of puppeteers and puppet builders around the world. As of this writing 92 people have signed it so far. The goal is to build the most comprehensive worldwide map of puppeteers possible, which I think will be a fantastic resource for the internet puppetry community.

If you're a puppeteer or puppet builder and haven't signed it yet, what are you waiting for?

Over the weekend I discovered a Frappr Machinima map, which has the potential to be an incredible networking tool for the Machinima community, but only has two members so far (me and Paul Marino!). How is that possible? I don't know, maybe Paul just created it, but no matter - if you make machinima please click here and put yourself on the map!

For those who don't already know, Frappr is a cool mapping and social networking tool built using Google Map's free API.