Virtual Marionette

9 and 10 of October been in a multitouch workshop with Tiago Serra in Audiência Zero in Porto.

in 2007 i was trying to build a multi-touch interface with just one camera to use in Animatic prototype, using Macromedia Director and WebXtra to track blobs in realtime.

I was in the wrong direction, i didnt want to use any surface, just the hands and gestures like the Microsoft Kinetic project that will be released this year. Very diffucult to achieve in those days, without a team and resources.

This workshop was very important to me to turn on some lights that were turned off some years ago.
Tiago Serra is doing a very great job and expanding the idea that is possible to anyone is capable of building a multi-touch interface.

I’m going to explore the multi-touch interface to control the puppets.

Virtual Puppets

animatic

Animatic – realtime puppet animation

A Virtual puppets system with special focus in the puppeteering art using several ways of interaction as a way to recreate the diferent styles of puppetry, including marionettes and rod puppets.

Video demonstration

INTERFACE: Wiimote, microphone, gamepad, keyboard, mouse

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Present at conference from Prof. Carlos Thomaz at INESC Porto.

Title: A simple and efficient supervised method for spatially weighted PCA in Face Image Analysis.
I thought it could be interesting for my project to use in a new lip-sync method, or to give some expression to the puppets. But the conference was very focus in the image reconstruction with PCA components witch wasn’t very useful for me.

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Working with Teatro de Marionetas do Porto gave me the privilege of working with someone who is a guide to my work.
I presented the project to the Art Director of Teatro de Marionetas do Porto, João Paulo Seara Cardoso that helped me in the Animatic Project and he will help me again. He his a great reference in the real world Marionettes a living book. I hope to learn many things with him, specially the art of puppets.

International Marionette Festival in Porto

MAKE LOVE NOT WAR, Teatro de Marionetas do Porto
25 September 2010

A very human marionette
The actor is the mask witch is the marionette

I´ve been invited to work with Teatro de Marionetas do Porto in a new show.
I´m very please to work with them again specially because of the coincidence of timing with the beginning with my project.