Bryn Oh Second Life Machinima

I love Bryn Oh's trippy, fantastical Second Life Machinima. Read more about her on PuppetVision and watch her latest work, filmed in the Immersiva sim in Second Life.

An Animator Praises Sid the Science Kid

Keith Lango thinks the use of digital puppetry on Sid the Science Kid makes sense and I have to agree (but then you knew that, didn't you?). More and more I can see how puppets and pixels really are coming together. Check out the comments for the above-linked post to read some interesting discussion on puppetry, mo-cap and animation.

BTW, new episodes of Sid The Science Kid start the week of May 4th on PBS.

Creature Shop Open House Recap

Debra Kaufman has written a nice recap of the previously-blogged Siggraph/Visual Effects Society event at the Creature Shop (see previous post). A couple people who were there Tuesday night wrote in to tell me about it yesterday; it sounds like it was a great event.

Digital Puppetry Open House at Jim Henson's Creature Shop

Puppeteers bring characters to life with the Jim Henson Company's patented Henson Digital Performance Studio.

The Visual Effects Society and LA ACM SIGGRAPH are hosting a very cool-sounding open house of sorts at Jim Henson's Creature Shop next week called Innovation in Puppetry: From Animatronics to CGI next Tuesday, January 13th at 6 p.m. The program includes a presentation about the Creature Shop, a live demo of the Henson Digital Performance Studio, an audience Q & A, guided tours of Jim Henson's Creature Shop and self-guided tours of the rest of the Henson lot.

This event is free to LA ACM SIGGRAPH and Visual Effects Society members and $20 for non-members. New members who sign up on site and pay the $40 annual membership fee will be admitted for free. If you live in or near L.A. and have an interest in the Creature Shop's work or have always wanted to see the Henson lot, this sounds like an opportunity you shouldn't miss.

Note: You're supposed to RSVP at the Visual Effects Society web site, but I couldn't figure out how to do it so if you're planning to attend, it's probably best to email them directly to sign up.

Digital Puppetry with Animata

Animata is open source real-time animation software, "designed to create animations, interactive background projections for concerts, theatre and dance performances". The goal of Animata is to make it really easy to create scenes with digital puppets that can be controlled via physical sensors, microphones or cameras.

Animata is another very promising digital puppetry system and it's already been used for a couple of interesting projects. Animata Jazz Pub is an interesting demo that shows how the Animata software can be used to react to live audio input. Reverse Shadow Theatre (seen above) is an installation that was created with Animata, inspired by Wayang Kulit, an Indonesian form of shadow puppet theatre.

If you want to try playing around with the software yourself, the Animata software can be downloaded for free for both the Mac and PC. The source is licensed under the GPL and can also be downloaded from Google Code.

Reverse Shadow Theatre link via Mary Robinette-Kowal.

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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Digital Puppetry with Microsoft's Touchless

Touchless is the name of new multitouch software from Microsoft Office Labs. Much like the recently-blogged CamTrax software (see previous post), it allows you to use almost anything to create input for a computer via an ordinary webcam. MS Labs has released a software developer kit under an open-source Microsoft Public License that can be used to create custom apps, like controllers for digital puppetry purposes.

I really think that the concept of optically tracking everyday objects (I believe the technical term is "colour blob tracking") has enormous potential for (affordable) digital puppetry; much more so than motion capture. I've added this to my already-lengthy list of technologies to check out as soon as I have some time to spare.

Via TechCrunch.