Digital puppetry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Digital puppetry is the manipulation and performance of digitally animated 2D or 3D figures and objects in a virtual environment that are rendered in real-time by computers. It is most commonly used in film and television production, but has also been utilized in interactive theme park attractions and live theatre.
The exact definition of what is and is not digital puppetry is subject to debate within the puppetry and computer graphics communities, but it is generally agreed that digital puppetry differs from conventional computer animation in that it involves performing characters in real time, rather than animating them frame by frame.
Digital puppetry is closely associated with motion capture technologies and 3D animation. It is sometimes referred to as Performance Animation. Machinima is a form of digital puppetry, although most machinima creators do not identify themselves as puppeteers.
[edit] History and usage
Digital puppetry was pioneered by the late Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets. The character Waldo C. Graphic in the Muppet television series The Jim Henson Hour is widely regarded to have been the first example of a digitally animated figure being performed and rendered in real-time on television and grew out of experiments Henson conducted in 1987 with a computer generated version of Kermit the Frog for InnerTube, which was the unaired television pilot for Jim Henson Hour.
Another early digital puppet was Mike Normal, which was developed by computer graphics company deGraf/Wahrman and was first demonstrated at the 1988 SIGGRAPH convention. The system developed by deGraf/Wahrman to perform Mike Normal was later used to create a representation of the villain Cain in the motion picture RoboCop 2, which is believed to be the first example of digital puppetry being used to create a character in a full-length motion picture.
In 1994, the BBC introduced a live digital puppet cat called Ratz, in the TV show Live & Kicking. He became the first real-time rendered digital puppet to appear on live TV. He also co-presented Children's BBC, and was eventually given his own show, RatzRun.
A more recent example of digital puppetry from 2003 is "Bugs Live", a digital puppet of Bugs Bunny created by Phillip Reay for Warner Brothers Pictures. The puppet was created using hand drawn frames of animation that were puppeteered by Bruce Lanoil and David Barclay. The Bugs Live puppet was used to create nearly 900 minutes of live, fully interactive interviews of 2D animated Bugs character about his role in the movie Looney Tunes: Back in Action in English and Spanish. Bugs Live also appeared at the 2004 SIGGRAPH Digital Puppetry Special Session with the Muppet puppet Gonzo.
In 2004 Walt Disney Imagineering used digital puppetry techniques to create the Turtle Talk with Crush attractions at the Walt Disney World and Disney's California Adventure theme parks. In the attraction, a hidden puppeteer performs and voices a digital puppet of Crush, the laid-back sea turtle from Finding Nemo, on a large rear-projection screen. To the audience Crush appears to be swimming inside an aquarium and engages in unscripted, real-time conversations with theme park guests. Tripod
[edit] Types of digital puppetry
Waldo puppetry - A digital puppet is controlled onscreen by a puppeteer who uses a telemetric input device connected to the computer. The X-Y-Z axis movement of the input device causes the digital puppet to move correspondingly. A keyboard is sometimes used in place of a telemetric input device.
Motion capture puppetry (mocap puppetry) - An object (puppet) or human body is used as a physical representation of a digital puppet and manipulated by a puppeteer. The movements of the object or body are matched correspondingly by the digital puppet in real-time.
Machinima - A production technique that can be used to perform digital puppets. Machinima as a production technique concerns the rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) using low-end 3D engines in video games. Players act out scenes in real-time using characters and settings within a game and the resulting footage is recorded and later edited in to a finished film.
[edit] External links
- Machin-X - Discussion of theories, tools and applications of digital puppetry as well as news from the digital puppetry community.
- Machinima.com - Large web portal for machinima.
