Digital puppetry

In previous years, our 48 hours team has experimented with paper puppetry shot on green screen. While I love the aesthetic that can be achieved with paper puppets in digital paper environments, the quality of animation has always been less than desirable. The benefit of being able to shoot the script early in the weekend in near real-time, is also often offset by the cost of wrangling a large amount of vfx shots through the edit, out to artists and back into the edit.

So going fully digital seemed like a great way of cutting down on the time required for post-production. Only, keyframe animation is time consuming. The main appeal of puppetry in a fast deadline environment is that it required almost zero keyframe animation. Using a simple expression for each character to convert audio amplitude into upper and lower bounds of jaw animation, we were able to animate dialogue very rapidly. It is essentially a digital version of the same technique used for Thunderbirds, where the puppets had solenoids to animate their mouths driven by current from a tape player. It leaves the puppeteers (or animators) free to concentrate on movement. Check out the results below!

"Entropy" by Toowit Toowoo - 48Hours 2014 from Toowit Toowoo on Vimeo.