Related Content.Though in these jaded times, puppets are often seen in the public eye as children’s entertainment, people of all ages have used and loved puppets for literally thousands of years. “All objects have a story to tell, but puppets are objects with rare power,” puppet expert Steve Abrams. They are objects made specifically to perform, he writes, like masks. So when we see them being still, in museums or elsewhere, questions arise, he writes: “How did they move? What did they say? Why was this kind of puppet crafted and what role did it play?”The person who knows those answers is the puppeteer, the person who performs with the puppet. Without a puppeteer, those questions go unanswered and puppets become a bit creepy.
Puppet Training. Start your Puppet journey here! From beginner to advanced, Puppet training gives you the skills you need to discover, manage, and deliver your applications and the infrastructure they run on. A Muppeteer, also known as a Muppet performer, is a puppeteer for the Muppets. The Muppeteers manipulate the puppets, provide voices, and otherwise brings life to the various characters. Caroly Wilcox prepared a 1983 memo (during pre-production for Fraggle Rock) which illustrated and defined key.
But doing puppetry can be a hard sell in this day and age, Elizabeth Blair for NPR. Just ask Basil Twist, whose modern puppet shows bring puppetry into the present, she writes.' It's not of this time,' Twist told her. 'It's not of the world we live in now.' He's encountered so many problems explaining puppetry to people that he carries around his main puppet in a tenor saxophone case. When people ask about the case, he says, 'I just tell them it's a tenor saxophone or a clarinet, just because the puppet conversation is too involved in those moments.' Twist is a third-generation puppeteer who has performed on stages across the country.
But his unusual story isn't the only way puppets are still important. Broadway shows like make extensive use of puppets, while film and television have used puppets practically since their inception, although in some cases puppets are replaced today by computer-generated images.Puppetry itself is a complicated field that combines performance and technical skill with craftsmanship and humor, master puppeteer and puppet maker Bob Flanagan Playbill. Flanagan worked with Jim Henson during the modern glory days of puppeteering with the Muppets.
A puppet's movements are a kind of expressive shorthand, he said; 'even the slightest hand gesture, or a tilt of the head can speak volumes that actors or lines can't always get across.' Puppet performance is a discipline that puppeteers are laboring to preserve, like the Malaysian puppet show style that one puppeteer recently used to create a. Pak Daing, a master of the Malaysian puppet tradition wayang kulit, told Lauren Young for Atlas Obscura that he translated the famous film for his style of puppetry in order to preserve the art and share it with a wider audience. And puppets are also being explored as a way to help children: the charitable arm of Sesame Street is currently aiming to help refugee children use puppets to.The Smithsonian Institution has a large collection of puppets. Here are a few examples from that collection.
Talking Story through the Medium of Digital Puppeteering YouTube VideoA puppeteer is a person who manipulates an inanimate object — a puppet— in real time to create the illusion of life. The puppeteer may be visible to or hidden from the audience. A puppeteer can operate a puppet indirectly by the use of strings, rods, wires, electronics or directly by his or her own hands placed inside the puppet or holding it externally. Some puppet styles require puppeteers to work together as a team to create a single puppet character. The relationship between the puppeteer and the puppet-maker is often assumed to be similar to that between an actor and a playwright. This may be so, but one of the characteristics of puppetry is that very often the puppeteer assumes the joint roles of puppet-maker, director, designer, writer and performer. In this case a puppeteer is a more complete theater practitioner than is the case within other theater forms. 'Puppetry is a highly effective and dynamically creative means of exploring the richness of interpersonal communication. By its very nature, puppetry concentrates on the puppet rather than the puppeteer. This provides a safety zone for the puppeteer and allows for exploration of unlimited themes through a safe and non-threatening environment for communication.' Puppetry by David Logan
dinosaur extinction
YouTube VideoUnderstanding the Traditional and the Digital Art of Puppetry WayangKulit in Central Java is probably one of theoldest continuous traditions of storytelling in the world, andcertainly among the most highly developed. The two great Indian epics,Ramayana and Mahabarata,captured the imagination of nearly every culture in Southeast Asiawhich had contact with Indians. Both of these epics have been with theJavanese since the influence of India was first felt during the firstcentury A.D. The dalang (puppeteer) manipulates the puppets, sings and taps out signals to the orchestra. He also speaks the parts for all characters; he must be able to render the shy sweetness in the voice of a princess, the spiteful whine of a lackey and the righteous but controlled anger of a noble hero.
Coming centuries ago from thesnowcapped Himalayas to the warm plains and snowfree mountains ofIndonesia, the original epic has of necessity undergone many drasticchanges, affecting not only geographical and personal names, but alsothe story itself.
Himalayas
Both epics are the basis of themost importantwayang kulitstories, now called wayang purwa. These akonor stories number as many as two hundred. In the process of Javaneseoral tradition, the stories serve as a bare outline and have beentransformed into entirely Javanese versions. Now one often refer tothese as Rama cycle for the Ramayana and Pendawa cycle for the Mahabarata
Wayang is well integrated in Javanese society, and it is considered to be a highlight of Javanese culture. Wayang is a Javanese word meaning 'shadow' or 'ghost' and is a theatrical performance of living actors (wayang orang), three dimensional puppets (wayang golek) or shadow images projected before a backlit screen (wayang kulit). The wayang kulit use two-dimensional puppets chiseled by hand of buffalo or goat parchment; like paper dolls, but with arms that swivel. A wayang kulit puppet is a stylized exaggeration of a human shape. Most of the stories performed in the shadow puppet shows are from Indian epics but they were transformed by generations of Javanese tellers. Digital Puppetry brings life Traditional Storytellingfor Adults and Children
Kikof - Dinosaur Comedian
CHOPS & Assoc. Live Animation YouTube Video
Kikof, the last remaining dinosaur stand-up comedian, explains why his species is now extinct in this performance animation by Gary Jesch -- for adults My Fish People - Talking Fish - COUNTING YouTube Video
This episode of My Fish People features Morphie and Delta, twotalking fish who are created by Gary Jesch of CHOPS & Assoc. LiveAnimation using ToonMX. Puppteering opens the Mind to Fantastic Possibilities YouTube VideoVisual Thinking #2 YouTube VideoHarry the Hipster, and Grump replacing Kermit as the square.
From Tradition Storytelling to Television to the Internet
YouTube Video
Gary Jesch demonstrates how he uses the system to create a live
animated cartoon character that can talk with people in real time, or do live recordings, using ToonMXUSA.com software
Jim Henson adaptedpuppets for the television format
The first main change was that in the staging. Jim Henson adaptedpuppets for the television format. Instead of the typical stage theyfocused entirely on controlling the puppets for a television screen.The main paradigm was “When you look at your TV you look at a puppetstage” and puppeteers become the composers of the shot. But to me itseemed obvious that this also means that new forms of staging andperformance had to emerge. For example, such an approach has to includemore work with and in relation to the camera.
The second basic element of the Henson method is the work with thescreen: Puppeteers control there puppets (usually standing with theirarms above the head controlling hand puppets, rods, or whatever theirworkshop provided) without directly looking at them. Instead, a camerapoints at the puppet and the performer only looks at this camera viewand plays the puppet through a monitor view. Brian Henson made thepoint by simply picking up a puppet and having a cute armadillo explainthe monitor technique to the audience - using a camera and a largeprojection screen.That alone was worth the visit!
Henson’s argument was that the performance of the puppet aboveimproves from “good” to “great” only when the puppeteer forgets that itis happening “up there” and instead completely concentrates on thescreen. It was exciting to see that in this method the whole controland physical activities remain relevant but have to be almost overcomeand sink into the unconscious to reach the true mastery. It sounded alot like completely mastering a game control system.
There are obvious advantages to this method: it makes the stagedesign easier and more accessible and it is originally a solid TV basedapproach. However, there are also some challenges (e.g. when a puppetwander off-stage the puppeteer is blind). Thus, it is an approach thathas to be carefully taught. The Henson company still used normal (notflipped) TV. That means that the image is basically mirrored. When thepuppeteer turns the puppet to the right, it turns to the left on thescreen. Yes, they have experimented with other techniques such asadjusted images and projection glasses but so far the original monitormethod has prevailed. The Henson workshop still teaches this method inits workshops in LA (which are, by the way, free - if one makes thecut). These workshops have also a lot of emphasis on Improv comedy - afield many machinima artists, whether it is the ILL clan orRoosterTeeth, are also familiar with.
The Basics of Puppeteering
Henson went on to talk different basics of puppeteering such as lipsync, dancing, using the eyeline match, and performing a walk withweight.
YouTube Video
He demonstrated the different ways Henson puppeteers - such asFrank Oz - would perform the very same action differently. This uniquetraits and the human touch would later become on of his main argumentsin digital puppeteering.
He also broke down the history of the Henson method and itsdevelopment over time: from the TV shows (using behind the scenesfootage from The Muppets) to the beginnings of animatonics (The Dark Crystal) that first used basic cables and direct translations and later moved into servos and other motors (Labyrinth).Again, this is a trade-off as servos obviously make the puppets easierto move and to control. On the other side, the old-fashionedphysicality and direct human control of a lever or cable produced a -according to Henson - superior quality animation. Motors are notcapable to reproduce the subtle and organic movement available indirect control systems. Either way: any single puppet was controlled bymultiple puppeteers at this point. His example from The Dark Crystalwas Oz playing Augra - together with 2 other puppeteers that operatedthe cables attached to this version of her puppet. In comparison:Hoggle in Labyrinth had a performer (Shari Weiser) inside apuppet suit with all the facial animations radio-controlled by 4 moreexternals (in this case with Brian Henson at the helm). One understandswhy Improv is such an important element in their philosophy if youthink about the level of intuitive teamwork needed to run any singleone of those puppets.
On he went to the Henson company’s first computer controlled character: the dog of The Storyteller.With 20 servos an obviously hugely complex puppet. The controlmechanism here was the aptly named “Computer Control System” whichfinally won an academy award in ‘93 and evolved into The Henson Digital Performance System.It used stick controls, not unlike joysticks where the fingers wouldactivate all kinds of different animations. Interestingly enough, inorder to control the complexity of the puppet they already pre-codedanimations into the system. That means, the animator could simply callfor a certain animation - let’s say “look sad” - and the computerwould translate that into the necessary motor activities. This isbasically the real-world version of the pre-canned animations we havetoday in game engines. Here is a basic architecture of the system takenfrom here.
These kind of controls were in continuous use e.g. for the Ninja Turtles as well as in the Dinosaurs series. The advantage: producing a 25 min Dinosaursepisode took about 2 weeks - while the same footage would have taken upto 10 weeks in film production. This was only possible through thesimplified control system. A puppet in Dinosaurs only needed2 puppeteers which greatly improve productivity. As Henson put it: “twocan ad-lib - six cannot” and he continues, “it was very liberatingbecause puppeteering became fun again.”
Within the Henson company, the Pilot from Farscape is seenas the most advanced puppet in this regard. Still, all these puppetswere physical entities of - at times - massive size and proportions.Henson showed the example of the Vogon in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Notably lip synch in these puppets was - as far as I can tell - done with hand control, much like in a sock puppet.
Finally, Henson looked into a first screen test for a “hybrid character”: Baby Robi. Baby Robicombined a real puppet with CGI post production to basically overlaylip synch over the main face of the baby (it reminded me of the wayEric Carl did his lip synch in Second Life for Silver Bellbefore there was such a thing in the engine). Henson somehow alludedthat there is more to come about this kind of hybrid puppeteering. Toadd some of my very own wild speculations (and hopes) here: BrianHenson is producer for The Power of the Dark Crystal, and Iwould argue that exactly such an approach might be the one way to keepthe beauty of the original while adding new features for an updatedversion. That would be supported by quotes I found on his talk one dayearlier at the AFI:
“Can I talk about future projects? I can’t? Okay, ifwe were going to be doing a Dark Crystal sequel, it’d be primarilytraditional puppetry, with a lot of the techniques you saw in that BabyRobi clip. . .” (as quoted from here)
Entrance Waldo, the first fully computer animated 3D live character; a collaboration of Henson and PDI.
Waldo existed in a low rez version that could be controlled inreal-time using the meanwhile highly elaborate Henson system - and ahigh rez version for the final render. Just as an addition to thistalk: Rex Grignon, supervising animator at PDI at the time describesthe process:
Essentially, it was a puppet, something that thepuppeteer was familiar with at the end (…) He could put his hand inthis and just fly it anywhere in the space within that region (…) Wemodeled a 50-polygon version of Waldo (…) It was all within screenspace. The puppeteers, when doing a normal puppet, would have theirhand in the puppet, and they’d be looking down at a monitor, so they’dbe able to gauge their performance, so they were absolutely used tothis.’ (from Alberto Menache’s Understanding Motion Capture)
Back then, Henson adds, a 2 minute real-time performance took 120hours render time to become TV quality. That changed - obviously.However, the credo of the Henson company was that the control shouldalways remain with the puppeteer, not with the computer. As Henson putsit “our eye spots the math” and therefore their systems keeps its focuson human control.
Their newest project is Sid the Science Kid, a educational children TV series broadcast on PBS these days. Every character in Sidis controlled in real-time by two puppeteers (one for the face, one forthe body). That demands two very different interfaces: the bodycontroller works a mo-cap suit, while the facial animator uses acomplex control system with both hands (find a short “making off” here). Surprisingly, I have not heard much about this show in the machinima community (with a few exception like this one).This is a series that might indeed by highly relevant for machinimaproduction and future development. For example, the camera in Sid is also live operated by human controllers - much like we see in This Spartan Life or Tra5hTa1k. With the new technology 25 min of Sidcan be produced in 2 1/2 days pure performance, followed by thenecessary cleaning up of the animation. A total of 5 pairs ofperformers can do the whole show.
All this time, the screen-based Henson approach was maintained andHenson argues that anybody who was trained in this approach canactually do this kind of digital puppetry. In fact, the hand-controlledpuppets are seen as the hardest to control.
The talk closed with a Q&A session during which I managed tosneak in the question whether Henson plans to make their system moreopenly available to us mortal beings. After all, part of the fun in Sesame Streetis that you can get a Cookie monster puppet and play. Henson kind ofdanced around the question and pointed more to possible socialnetworking and online elements that will be launched in connection withSid. So I don’t hold my breath - but then again: a new Dark Crystal would certainly compensate.
Storytelling through Digital Puppetry
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YouTube Video
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