Digital Puppetry

Managed to catch a demonstration of digital puppetry from Brian Henson (the son of Jim Henson). He talked for about two hours about the history of puppetry (The Muppets), the history of animatronics as they used it in film (The Dark Crystal, Dinosaurs), with up to five puppeteers being required per character, the evolution to more sophisticated puppet controls, and eventually on to digital puppetry. The final demo was of a new Henson show called Sid The Science Kid on PBS that is fantastic for two reasons:

• it is an attempt to get kids interested in science at an early age (4-6) which anyone should applaud
  
• the show is produced using digital puppetry which results in a more organic feel to the characters with the side benefit of the process being far more efficient than traditional CGI
  

Demo of simple traditional hand puppet in front of a camera.
Of course I was most interested in the digital puppets. As Brian is a puppeteer he mentioned that he was more apt to tackling characters by having an inside to outside control of the character's emotions. This is apparently much more difficult when using motion capture on actors to capture the emotion outside to inside (not very effective). I think the puppetry stuff works very well for cartoony, fantastic, magical, or science fiction elements (ring a bell?). Not so much for real world style animation with human characters. The puppeteers were shown with elaborate rigs while controlling the digital characters and it was impressive to see how much control they could actually exert. The action is 'captured' using something like a three camera setup that would be similar to that used for a sitcom and then edited. They were doing something like 2-2.5 episodes a week and had forty episodes ready to go.

A couple of other interesting tidbits

• In general terms Hollywood really likes post production heavy films now because even though it costs more, it means the studios have far more control than when a movie is preproduction heavy (cited Spike Jones upcoming movie Where The Wild Things Are).
• That the CG feel is disappearing as both the technical limitations continue to fall and that distinctive cold and mechanical look will disappear as the hardware and software improve, and also as Hollywood becomes tired of it and moves away from using it exclusively.
• That Eastern European puppetry was often the last media that was censored by the state (cool trivia) and could be a refuge of commentary.
  
• UNCONFIRMED RUMOR - that a new Dark Crystal is in the works.
• Is Pixar interested in digital puppetry? Maybe. But their characters are already such great characters that it might not be necessary. That is because Pixar takes the time to craft great characters.
  

New Sid the Science Kid series - all 'animated' characters are actually digital puppets controled by a Henson company puppeteer.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this impacts animation in the future, and whether or not I can get one of those rigs myself.

Something Old - Something New

I posted in 2006 about the Antikythera mechanisms being deciphered as an ancient clock mechanism.

A new paper points out that the clock actually contains mechanisms for an olympic calendar and an eclipse calendar and identifies the potential source of the mechanism. This video at Nature is impressive with slices of X-rays being used to generate a computer model showing the clockwork in action. State of the art modern techniques being used to decipher at 2000 year old clock. Not sure which is more impressive.

I asked before if this would show up in Second Life. Steampunk is strongly trending upwards. Will this show up in SL somewhere, somehow? Are there real clockworks in SL?

Scientific Research In Virtual Worlds

A sort of review article in Science this week by William Bainbridge on the sorts of research one can do in virtual worlds (not sure if it is full access or not). The references might be the most useful part of the paper as I did not read anything all that new (mostly introducing these virtual worlds like Second Life and WoW to a scientific audience and then listing the types of research or interesting events that occur in them). Unfortunately many of the references will not be accessible to the lay person

Friday Nite Roundup

A collection of links of interest:

1. MMORPG company goes bankrupt. Players want to buy to buy the game (from the BBC).
2. The Antikythera Mechanism has been solved (world's first computational device? - how long before a copy shows up in SecondLife? - via NYT).
3. Fox News to interview Angel Munoz (from CPL). Is this good,or bad? How will Fox News treat the concept of playing video games in a tournament. Freak of nature style news reporting, or video games are bad and are subverting our youth style news? (via GotFrag).
4. 3DFilmMaker reports that machinima is topping the list of gaming innovation awards.
5. There.com has a machinima festival (have not finished watching all of the entries yet - There looks a lot like Second Life).

The digital revolution is of course sweeping through the filmmaking industry, ripping it apart from the inside like a syncytial virus. How long before the actual process of filmmaking no longer uses film at all? When will the last big budget Hollywood film be shot on film (future Jeopardy trivia question). How many Final Cut Pros does it take to make a blockbuster?

Second Life Visits Nature

Back from a nice relaxing vacation.

I havent' seen this posted on any SL related blog, yet. It seems that Linden Lab's CTO, Cory Ondrejka, visited the office of Nature, the premiere science magazine (via Nascent, and Chark).

The posts merely roll off a set of PR checkpoints, most of which have been covered elsewhere.

What I think is interesting is that Linden Labs actually shows up at a place like Nature's offices to discuss Web 2.0 technologies and where the crazy interweb is heading. I don't see Blizzard or other game companies or even the makers of There reaching out to organizations like Nature Publishing to embrace these sorts of discussions.

The other interesting point I discovered was when I was listening to secondcast episode 25. SL is growing so fast that it is quickly becoming beyond control. With the recent changes to registration (no more credit card required) it is expected that SL will reach 1 million registrants before the end of the year. How long before SL reaches the tipping point? With Linden Labs pushing SL through a phenomenal PR machine, and the growth at 15% per month, and with the connection in-game to the world wide web, it will only be a matter of time before SL becomes the virtual MySpace.