I’m an independent filmmaker and puppeteer in Toronto, Canada who blogs about puppetry and film.
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European Buildings built out of paper by Megan Brain.
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Hand craved foam puppet head by Phil Fletcher.
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Simpsons couch gag animated by John K.
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Sid the Science Kid helps explain digital television for the PBS Kids set. Confused about this whole DTV thing that everybody (in the U.S. anyway) has been talking about? Well, let Sid the Science Kid help you make sense of...
Bryn Oh is a virtual artist/avatar inside the online world of Second Life (photo credit: ) Lately, I’ve been really intrigued by the work of Bryn Oh, one of a number of ground-breaking artists who are creating virtual art inside Second Life (SL). Bryn Oh creates steampunk-inspired statues and three-dimensional environments that are really well-thought...
Puppeteers bring characters to life with the Jim Henson Company’s patented Henson Digital Performance Studio. Debra Kaufman has written a nice recap of the previously-blogged Siggraph/Visual Effects Society event at the Creature Shop (see previous post). A couple people who were there Tuesday night wrote in to tell me about it yesterday; it sounds like...
Kermit the Frog greets visitors to the Jim Henson Company studio lot in Hollywood. The Visual Effects Society and LA ACM SIGGRAPH are hosting a very cool-sounding open house of sorts at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop next week called Innovation in Puppetry: From Animatronics to CGI next Tuesday, January 13th at 6 p.m. The program...
Reverse Shadow Theatre is an installation created with Animata digital puppetry software. Animata is open source real-time animation (or digital puppetry) software that is “designed to create animations, interactive background projections for concerts, theatre and dance performances”. The goal of Animata is to make it really easy to create scenes with digital puppets that can...
The new digital puppetry series Sid the Science Kid (see previous post) is now on the air and TV Guide recently went behind the scenes to see how the Jim Henson Company creates it. The Wall Street Journal has also been covering the show’s unique production process. Speaking of which, Brian Henson was in Silver...
Sid The Science Kid is just one of several new shows coming to TV from the Jim Henson Company. The Jim Henson Company must be a busy place to be these days; they’ve got a bunch of new projects in the works, including the previously-blogged Fraggle Rock movie and three new TV shows for kids!...
UK company Virtual Puppet creates digital characters like this one seen above. Virtual Puppet, a UK company that “specializes in motion capture technologies and involves itself with the production of advertising, face to face experiential marketing and performance for theatre and live interactive television,” was featured this past weekend on the British edition of Dragon’s...
I received a copy of the latest book in the popular “Dummies” series – Machinima For Dummies – last week and it’s fantastic. I think it’s the most practical, useful book that’s been written about Machinima yet. The two authors of the book are Machinima filmmaker Johnnie Ingram and Hugh Hancock, the Machinima pioneer who...
A digital self-portrait by UK puppeteer and animator Craig Crane. The fence that divides puppetry and animation is a pretty low one and lots of artists like Phil Vischer, Karen Prell, Mike Quinn, and Nate Pacheco (to name just a few) find themselves jumping from one side to the other mid-career and Craig Crane is...
Panda Puppet is a new digital puppetry system being developed to create better looking Machinima with more expressive, relatable characters. Long time readers of the blog are probably familiar with Machin-X, which I started back in December of 2005 as I got increasingly interested in Machinima and other ways that puppetry is being combined with...
Nintendo’s MIRT (Mario in Real-Time) digital puppetry system enables “live” appearances by Super Mario around the world. Most people don’t know this, but Nintendo is something of a pioneer in the field of digital puppetry. Since 1994 they have been using a system they call MIRT (“Mario in Real-Time”) to have many of their iconic...
