Digital puppetry involves using human input to control and animate specialized 3D models in real-time. It is related to virtual puppetry, real-time computer animation, and new media puppetry. Digital puppets trace their lineage back through traditional puppetry forms like shadow puppetry and string puppetry. One of the earliest innovators was Lee Harrison III, who created motion capture in the 1960s using analog circuits to animate 3D figures in real-time. Notable digital puppets include Waldo C. Graphic from 1988 and Mike the Talking Head. There are different types of digital puppetry including waldo puppetry using input devices, motion capture puppetry using physical manipulation, and machinima using

1. Digital Puppetry

2. What is Digital Puppetry?Real Time Computer AnimationHuman Input to Give motion to specialized 3-D Models Motion Capture

3. Affiliated TermsVirtual PuppetryReal-Time Computer Animation New Media PuppetryDigipuppetsInteractive Character Control

4. Affiliated Fields Virtual RealityDigital Ventriloquism Traditional Puppetry Motion Capture

5. History (prehistory)Puppetry as a continuous 30,000 year old artShadow puppetryString PuppetryMarionettes Digital Puppets are pixel and computer reiterations of traditional forms.

6. History (Prehistory)as little of them as is necessary".Gordon Craig, the Über-marionette“The ideal actor envisioned by the designer Gordon Craig he or she would be an egoless 'super-puppet', wholly at the bidding of the play's director. He insisted that ‘acting is not an art’ and believed that actors should represent a character's emotions by ‘feeling as little of them as is necessary’.” http://www.theater-dictionary.com/definition/uber-marionette.htmlThe ideal actor envisioned by the designer Gordon Craig (see Craig family); he or emotions by "feeling

7. Dawn Of A New Age Lee Harrison III. animated figures using analog circuits and a cathode ray tube. Harrison rigged up a body suit with potentiometers and created the first working motion capture rig, animating 3D figures in real-time on his CRT screen. He made several short films with this system, which he called ANIMAC

8. Waldo C. Graphic, created in 1988 by Jim Henson and Pacific Data Images

9. Types of digital puppetryWaldo puppetryA digital puppet is controlled onscreen by a puppeteer who uses a telemetric input device connected to the computer. The X-Y-Z axis movement of the input device causes the digital puppet to move correspondingly. A keyboard, mouse or joystick-like device is sometimes used in place of a telemetric control.Motion capture puppetry (mocap puppetry) or Performance AnimationAn object (puppet) or human body is used as a physical representation of a digital puppet and manipulated by a puppeteer. The movements of the object or body are matched correspondingly by the digital puppet in real-time.MachinimaA production technique that can be used to perform digital puppets. Machinima involves creating computer-generated imagery (CGI) using the low-end 3D engines in video games. Players act out scenes in real-time using characters and settings within a game and the resulting footage is recorded and later edited in to a finished film.

10. Mike The Talking Head 1988 The system developed by deGraf/ Wahrman to perform Mike Normal was later used to create a representation of the villain Cain in the motion picture RoboCop 2, it might be the first example of digital puppetry being used to create a character in a full length motion picture.

11. Design Process Step 1: The Idea

12. Step 2: Conceptual Design

13. Step 3: Puppet Building

14. Step 4: Digital Painting

15. Step 5: Rigging

16. Step 6: Animation and Rendering

17. Web-ography http://www.delicious.com/poemsparrow/digitalpuppetry