Visiting Scrooge puts a Machinima spin on a Christmas classic.
In the mood for a little holiday Machinima? Take a look at Visiting Scrooge, a two-part film based on Dickens' A Christmas Carol and made using The Sims 2. A behind-the-scenes page about the film is also available.
Bill Nighy's motion capture performance was used to create Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.
Earlier this week Variety ran a good article about the growing use of motion capture in feature films and how actors are increasingly been utilized as virtual puppeteers to create fantastic creatures and effects. Most of the article deals with Bill Nighy's impressive mo-cap performance in last summer's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.
I'm in the process of converting Machin-X to a new Blogger Beta template so the site may look messy for the next several days. Also, embedded YouTube videos don't seem to work anymore. Does anyone know what's up with that?
Digital puppetry usually involves using computers to create puppetry, but this may be the first example of actually turning a computer in to a puppet...the newer Mac Powerbooks are equipped with a Sudden Motion Sensor that detects if the computer has been dropped or is flying through the air. The purpose of the sensor is to minimize damage from impacts by locking down the Mac's hard drive if it's suddenly in motion, but since the sensor can be accessed via software with a little programming knowledge you can hack it and explore all kinds of interesting possibilities. Andreas Nicolas Fischer in Germany used this feature to turn his Powerbook in to a marionette for an art project. When the computer is swung a animated character on screen reacts with realistic physics to the movement. A build summary for the project is available on his web site along with some of the source code used for the project.
Just upgraded Machin-X to the new Blogger Beta last night. As a result the RSS feed is a little wonky. Everything should be fixed in the next day or so.
Here's some test footage for Laugh Pad, a new digital puppetry series developed by The Jim Henson Company and The Dan Clark Company. I love the main character (is Lagoon his name?) and his infectious laugh. It looks like this show could be lots of silly fun and it's one of the best examples of digital puppetry I've seen. Hopefully it will become a series!
