Quick Experiment With Panda Puppet

This was just a quick experiment that I did yesterday...I took a head that was modeled and rigged by Calvin over at BlenderArtists.org and set it up so that it could be puppeteered right inside a standard Blender window (i.e. not using the game engine) with a joystick. It was quick to set-up and fairly easy to do, I may experiment a bit more with this.

BusinessWeek on the Future of Machinima

BusinessWeek recently ran a story on Machinima and how more and more game developers are packaging their titles with Machinima creation tools. It's a good read that outlines the history of Machinima and ponders where the artform is headed in the future.

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.

Nintendo to Launch Indie Game Development For the Wii

GigaOM reports that Nintendo wants to open up the Wii platform to indie developers next year. Dubbed "Wii Ware", this new service will be designed to enable developers to create small, downloadable games for the Wii in a manner similar to Microsoft's XNA Game Studio for the XBox 360. Considering the Wii's motion-control capability I think this is great news for digital puppetry and suggests all kinds of exciting developments could be on the horizon. It's really great to see Nintendo embracing the potential of user generated content.

Thanks to Brian for the heads up about this!

Quick Panda Puppet Update

There's been some renewed interest in Panda Puppet recently in the blogosphere and I've been getting emails asking about the status of it so I wanted to post a quick update. Long story short I had a somewhat unexpected death in my family back in April and some of the things I was working on (primarily Panda Puppet) had to be set aside for a little while, which I'm sure everyone can understand. I'll be returning to work on Panda Puppet more or less full-time in a few weeks and when that happens I'll bring everybody up to speed on all the latest.

For those of you visiting Machin-X for the first time, read these posts to get a general overview of the project.