Virtual Marionette

It was a privilege to participate in the magnificent masterclass of Michael Meschke.

He started by making an overview of his large experience working with puppets and then begun to expose is very particular and interesting point of view of making Puppet Theater, the Why, How and What.
He talked about how and why to choose different puppet techniques; how to give life to a puppet; he shared with us his puppetry principles and finally we had the chance to explore how to create motion with a bunkaru style puppet where groups of three participants manipulated a puppet.

Michael is a puppet poet, he brings magic to the puppet theater.

Thanks to Michael Meschke to share his great knowledge with us.

Michael Meschke at Montemor-o-novo MasterClass

Actor-manipulator relation with the marionette

Michael Meschke born in Dantzig in 1931 and went to Sweden in 1939 with his family.

He started his professional puppeteer carrier, creating in 1958 the Marionetteatren of Stockholm,  an important reference. He funded the Marionettmuseet of Stockholm in the 70´s from his own large  production materials, enriched by acquisitions around the world.

From the 28th to the 31th of May of 2013 took place the Puppit Lab at Montemor-o-novo Marionette Festival.

Lab-Puppit is a digital puppetry workshop.
We share our research methodology for building and rigging virtual marionettes and explore manipulation techniques.
The video shows the result performance from the 4 days workshop, which was presented at the 6th Montemor-o-novo Marionette Festival.
In this performance the participants performed with two puppets using body motion captured by two Microsoft Kinects; two WIImotes were mapped to two flying buttons (props); an iPad and an iPhone were used to control the face expression of the puppets and to control scene events.
Performers: Bruno, Isa, Ricardo, Nuno

Live Music (not the music in the video): Ricardo, Grifu
Voice (not in the video): Sónia

Workshop oriented by Sónia Barbosa, Luís Grifu
May.2013

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In the 20 of May i´ve made a very short presentation of the research work-in-progress to Professor Sally-Jane Norman.

It was a great opportunity to share my developments and receive great insights from someone with so much experience.

In the 30th of April i´ve presented the Virtual Marionette demos to a reporter from a national news paper “Jornal Notícias”.

This is a great opportunity to show our work developments to the community.

“RagDolls – Gestural Puppets” is an artistic installation where the participants can take control of one character from a couple of dolls with their own hands. The manipulation of the human player in the set will disrupt the balance of the dolls.

RagDolls was presented at the Imagens of Real Imaginado in Biblioteca Almeida Garrett, Porto – November 2013

Virtual Marionette was presented at Noite Europeia dos Investigadores (European researchers night) in Porto, Portugal.

An excellent opportunity to share my work and disseminate digital puppetry around the community.

I´ve received a lot of feedback, and realized how hard it is to work in adverse conditions

Presenting the digital shadow puppetry “Shape Your Body ” at the Computer Human Interaction conference CHI 2012 at Austin, Texas.

In this picture it is possible to identify the Shape Your Body Poster

Made many interesting contacts and received important feedback´s about my work.

I´ve made a presentation to PIC (Porto Interactive Center)  to share with my colleagues this great experience.

Feel free to download the PDF file: chi-austin 2012

I have attended to the string puppet workshop oriented by Stephen Mottram and Marcelo Lafontana at ESMAE Porto in April 2012.

A 10 days workshop divided into building methods and the art of manipulation.

The first part we had to build a marionette based on a kit developed by Marcelo Lafontana and the second part of the workshop we had the opportunity to learn and apply the manipulation methods of a marionette. Stephen Mottram shared some of the most important principles of the marionette biomechanics.

Collaboration with Teatro de Formas Animadas (TFA) to create a Live Film concept production using shadow puppetry. This concept applies film language and aesthetics  to a puppetry live performance. Mixing real-time editing, post-production and digital performance animation with traditional shadow puppetry with sand drawings and live music performance with digital post-production.

The puppeteer and the music performer controlled all the contents that were produced and presented in real-time in a screen located in the middle of them.

Click here to go to Prometeu keynote site (pictures and  workflow) or here to read more about the project at grifu.com

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