puppets

Orders of boxes, composed while packing, after Calvino, Borges, and Macdonald et alia. (Especially for qtrnca.)

Satyrday afternoon uilos and elf and I got to see Brian Henson give a talk about "digital puppetry" at the AFI Silver. Brian's a lot of fun. He opened with a demonstration of Henson puppeteering techniques, with a camera aimed somewhere over his head projecting an image onto the screen plus an armadillo puppet. It's just amazing watching "behind the scenes" stuff for things you take for granted. Like the Muppets. While he was working the armadillo his attention was mostly focused on the monitor at his feet, which he mentioned showed what was actually going on on the screen. So part of learning to be a Henson puppeteer involved reversing left and right: it's not a mirror despite seeming to be one. If you want the puppet in the image you're watching to move left, you have to move it left, not right. And leaning puppets are common among learning puppeteers, because they start trying to compensate for the lean, which makes it lean even more (because they're trying to compensate as though in a mirror). . .

Anyway. "Digital puppetry" is manipulating a character onscreen as though it were a puppet. He described it as "more organic, and sloppier," than normal computer-generated techniques. I'd believe that. With digital puppetry you get great feedback: no running the animation and tweaking values to get it right, just changing how you move so that the puppet onscreen moves properly. Very cool stuff.

He also talked briefly about the Dark Crystal Sequel a possible future project ("Can I talk about future projects? I can't? Okay, if we were going to be doing a Dark Crystal sequel, it'd be primarily traditional puppetry, with a lot of the techniques you saw in that Baby Robi clip. . ."), which was neat. He also said that any such project was probably still years in the future. Oh well.

And then dinner at Da Marco, followed by a Sunday with friends old and new. Good times.