![]() ![]() And of course, it doesn’t all have to be improvised: you can still perform pre-planned scenes or adopt a hybrid approach of writing and acting.īecause the technology can work in real time, there’s opportunity to tell real-time stories. I always loved the way the Jim Henson Company would shoot Muppet scenes, with loose outlines and room for interpretation. If you’re willing to treat animation more like improvised live action, you can fall down a rabbit hole of happy accidents. ![]() In order to make the characters believable, artists then have to reverse-engineer hints of imperfection and spontaneity. When you get to finally seeing a character move on screen, it feels like their destiny is greatly predetermined. So much of animation is pre-visualizing, pre-planning, pre-everything. Puppet provides is the introduction of improvisation in the story process. Burt Starling spreading fake news about Cartoon Brew! Thankfully, as we crack problems with various puppets, we can share the technology and techniques across all of them, and they become more robust. Each puppet is different, so we have to tune each one to taste. The biggest challenge we face in building these characters is striking a balance between fidelity, the ergonomics of performance, and mixing in the right amount of simulation. He’s currently getting a big makeover for season two, and will soon be a very articulate, expressive character. In season one of BNN, his range of motion was constrained by own imposed limits. The contentĭ’Silva: Burt was one of our first prototype characters. Our friends at Wonder Unit have been inspirational, taking modern consumer technology practices and cross-pollinating them into the film world. Game engines like Unity and Unreal have triggered a boom in filmmakers working in real time, and we’re constantly looking at the bleeding edge there. We rapidly prototype and print our hardware in-house using the Ultimaker & Makerbot 3d printers. We also inherit tactile feedback and useful constraints from the physicality of our “glove.” Additionally, we’re building more ergonomic companion controllers to complement the core performance, allowing the performer to extend the capability of the characters. Our hardware approach provides continuous data, because the sensors are mechanical. Cameras have limited fields of view, which means the performance is constrained to a pretty small physical area. Even with pose estimation, optical data suffers from occlusion when hands get into untrackable poses. Optical technologies like the Yo Puppet app work well as fun consumer toys, but are not reliable and quite restrictive. The hardwareĭ’Silva: Before we did the deep dive into building hardware, we tried optical approaches, and boy were they hairy. Our artists work like a hybrid of animator and puppeteer, and we draw inspiration from both disciplines. The characters I was interested in performing had always been less literal than humanoids more like Jim Henson’s Muppets, with simpler, abstracted forms. A standard motion-capture approach always felt like too much overhead and overkill. Though we put the project on ice, the idea of integrating performance capture input into animation workflows kept brewing in my mind. The piece we never got to was mixing in “performed” pictures, giving the artist the ability to directly manipulate the timing and picture. Like other packages, you could create pictures frame by frame (straight ahead) and tween (more like pose to pose). A while back, we were building a product called Lightbox, a 2d animation package. The second desire was iterating on a more tangible thread: performing animation. I wanted to reduce the time from thought to screen loop, so I could play with ideas faster. With animation being such a beautiful but laborious art form, it can be daunting to build up the momentum to pull the idea out of your brain. Puppet Animation System is the sum of a few influences, the first being a desire to move faster. The origins Pasquale D’Silvaĭ’Silva: The Mr. Puppet began, what it can and can’t do, and how it could change storytelling in animation. This was, in fact, Thinko’s initial approach - but as Pasquale D’Silva, animator and Thinko co-founder, tells Cartoon Brew, it didn’t suit the studio’s purposes. Puppet brings to mind optical-based augmented reality, whereby computer or phone cameras track movement and use the visual data as the basis for animation. But Thinko is developing a second season and two other shows, and stresses that its characters will become more dynamic as it upgrades its hardware. The series, more a proof of concept than anything else, is visually basic: Burt doesn’t move much and his facial expressions are limited. Thinko has demonstrated the system in BNN: Bird News Now, a satirical news show starring avian anchor Burt Starling. ![]()
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