After a couple weeks of downtime and reflection, the 2012 Countdown with Bony Tony Live webcast is finally available to view on-demand. We cleaned up a few slides and added some background music, plus an overlay of the performance/production so you get a sense for how this all came together. Otherwise, this is all completely original as it was presented Live 12-21-2011 on Facebook and this blog.
Overall, we are very happy with the results, given a first ever effort for both the studio as well as the industry. We welcome your feedback and input as we anticipate improvements along the way and are looking for your participation.
Shortly, we will have a series of posts regarding the process to bring Bony Tony to life as a live animated character, plus a few insights into the technical challenges and possibly even some how-to sections.
Wow, technology and the arts has come sooo far! What a great time to be alive and have the opportunity to experiment in this space!
That’s right deadbeats, just when you thought all humanity had no hope remaining, Bony Tony has come to the surface to share the misery with his dead friends.
Beginning December 21st, 2010, Bony Tony himself will be available to take your questions and concerns about the celestial and ancient Mayan coincidence that could mean the end of everything forever, or simply an extra 13 milliseconds to the Gregorian guesstimates. We’re gonna help you determine how much to hoard, what friends to ditch and where to build your bunker, plus we have critical insight into where to route your savings account info!
Streaming live in Facebook, your participation is encouraged. This is your chance to tap the dead on the shoulder and find out if Elvis is sighted in the afterlife as often as Jesus.
Be sure to witness the historic live 3D animation as Bony Tony himself possesses a puppeteer in real time during our program!
So pull up your pants, pour a double brew and join us for the darkest show on the internet Wednesday December 21st, 2011 at 8PM MST.
That’s right deadbeats, just when you thought all humanity had no hope remaining, Bony Tony has come to the surface to share the misery with his dead friends.
Beginning December 21st, 2010, Bony Tony himself will be available to take your questions and concerns about the celestial and ancient Mayan coincidence that could mean the end of everything forever, or simply an extra 13 milliseconds to the Gregorian guesstimates. We’re gonna help you determine how much to hoard, what friends to ditch and where to build your bunker, plus we have critical insight into where to route your savings account info!
Streaming live in Facebook, your participation is encouraged. This is your chance to tap the dead on the shoulder and find out if Elvis is sighted in the afterlife as often as Jesus.
Be sure to witness the historic live 3D animation as Bony Tony himself possesses a puppeteer in real time during our program!
So pull up your pants, pour a double brew and join us for the darkest show on the internet Wednesday December 21st, 2011 at 8PM MST.
When you think of the term “perfomance animation” you probably think of images of Gollum in Lord of the Rings, hunched over and creepily repeating “my precious”. Or if you’re like me and enjoy all of the behind the scenes, making-of content that fulfills my rock-n-roll, film maker fantasy, you are familiar with images of Andy Serkis hunched over and embodying every bit as much of Gollum as resulted in the film.
Andy Serkis Playing Gollum - Photo by New Line Productions
Either way, most people are familiar with the concept of people performing in blue or green screen rooms with motion capture “balls”, velcro attached to spandex jumpsuits as computers analyze and record location information.
However, with the recent gaming industry boom and resulting hardware and software developments, some basic motion capture technology has fallen into the consumers living room, likely without them even realizing it. Enter the Microsoft Kinect Camera. No longer do you need to dress like you are riding in the Tour de France to capture motion data or even perform live animation. Granted, the professional solutions in the industry are still top notch and by no means does the Kinect camera replace these technologies, rather offers a peice of it to the general public.
Naturally there’s a world full of engineers, tinkerers and dreamers who will tap into available technology and tools to create brilliant experiences. Many people are plugging the Kinect camera into computers and writing code to use this technology for fun, educational, experimental, medical and many other applications. Our interest was to determine if performance animation is ready for live streaming and new business opportunities.
Last week, I had the pleasure of meeting a seasoned professional in the field of real-time, interactive animation – Gary Jesch of CHOPS & Associates. A referral from our LinkedIn network of media professionals (Freelance Audio Visual Technicians), it was suggested that I look into his business after discussing real time animation with a video engineer.
Turns out, Gary is one of the pioneers of live, performance animation. Creating virtual characters and performance animation solutions for numerous industries and clients for nearly twenty years. Although his most prominent character is his “CHOPS (Cyber Human On a Performance System)” character, among his dozens of various characters, his true character is himself. He was immediately open and easy to communicate with. You could certainly sense that Gary had a great “ear” for people. His live performances and interactions with people over the years has certainly created a polished experience and you can tell he truly enjoys his work.
His offer to participate in a networking luncheon we were having the following week was a no-brainer. We had planned an Imaginology open house to demonstrate live character animation streaming and CHOPS (http://www.chops.com/) was a perfect fit. His performance animation plugs directly into teleconferencing software to allow him to interact in real-time on your desktop or laptop computer. The best part may simply be that the system just worked. No crashes, no delays, no issues. This truly helps make the experience immersive. You are simply conversing with an animated character. I suppose this is the best form of technology. The technology that you don’t even notice as technology, but rather as technology that just works and stays out of the way.
We set him up to engage people at the door as they came in and he stopped almost everyone in their tracks.His characters entertained, inspired dozens of questions and kept everyone on the edge of their tongue as they watched the characters in awe and wonder. This is where Gary truly shines, as he keeps the momentum and engages everyone in the room, simply continuing the conversation and interest. I can see where this technology has tons of potential for business. Not only do you get great value in attention and retention of your brand, but the animation can be recorded to create character animation sequences for other materials as needed (think live animation production services).
It was a true pleasure to see a professional performance animation artist at work. I now look forward to my next experience with performance animation on either side of the camera.
Overall, performance animation seems to be ready for the business world, as well as the consumer. The question remains: is the consumer more ready than the business world?
3D depth scanning is the bomb right now. With the Kinect camera for the Xbox and other similar low cost 3D scanners on the market, it enticed me to give this technology a whirl. Being trained originally in 3D animation production techniques, the technology curve is probably a little less slippery of a slope for me. Undaunted, and with spare hours that would otherwise be wasted sleeping, I set out to explore the newest frontiers of 3D animation. Little did I know I would find so much fun!
I had just finished setting up a studio in my garage for green screen video work, so I had some room to work in. We had always suggested that we would scan in our puppet characters for continuation of their personae since paper mache and other raw materials have a limited shelf life. Plus we have always run into walls with how far we can take our writing given that our puppets can’t swim, catch on fire or explode without some serious trickery. Plus, I’ve just always wanted to own what used to be called “pointelizer” technology that allows you to define points in space and feed them into 3D animation software. thereby recreating an object in the computer (whoa…beam it up).
My first tests were with the Microsoft Kinect camera and while I was intrigued and inspired by it’s motion tracking potential etc. I was a little let down by it’s scanning resolution for a static image. I ran some tests and was left with some serious scan noise. So after shopping the low cost 3D scanning tools available and placing a couple of calls into local engineering/scanning companies who wanted little to do with me, I decided it was time to own a 3D scanner of my own.
The scanner arrives. I’m so excited about this happening, that I immediately make use of my studio and turn on a camera, but forget to check the mic inputs. Since they are set to input instead of onboard mic, I record an hour of silent excitement as I unbox and detail the pieces while plugging in and loading software.
All systems go!
Scanning itself is a very tedious, arduous and all the other 50cent words to describe grueling! However, you are witnessing an object being “virtually” replicated before your very eyes, so for me it was a labor of curiosity and awe.
Ultimately, I learned that sometimes using less information was preferable in the scan results. Of course, I was aware that point clouds can tally in the millions and each one contains 3 sets of data (X, Y and Z) plus various other meta information to describe the space as well as scanned images etc. but I had no idea how exact the information would be and where the sweet spot was for “good enough” to take into other software and clean up. Turns out, the fewer divisions and the less the point data, the easier the mess is to work with later. Plus we’re working with puppets, so the more primitive the geometry, the more appealing the result.
Now in all fairness, the scanner that I purchased could very well be used to scan an object in and create a completely usable mesh right out of the software, however, it would need to be fairly small (under 13 inches for the version we have/you can buy a more advanced version of the software for an extra 1k but I couldn’t justify it after spending 3k already!) and it would need to be somewhat limited in fine detail, especially the recessive kind, such as large openings or cavities. Some of the rear teeth of Bony had to be created after the fact for example, because they simply were not picked up in the scanning process.
We were able to scan in a perfectly usable mesh that required minimal clean up work (about 15-20 hours) and use this as a basis for development. Our goal was to develop characters for live animation which is processor intensive so this was expected.
The ease of use and the real time feedback is what hooked me. The detail of the scans was just as expected and was exciting to work with.
The next steps in this blog series will include the process of scanning, some of the headaches that were experienced as well as the successes.
Summer has finally boiled over and into a new season for development. H.B. Lawson a.k.a. Vikingboy has been writing Afterlife drafts, The Fishhead II Incident is still in development and we are now firing lasers in the new Imaginology laboratory. All systems are “go” and our team is working on some exciting new developments in both story and technology.
The most recent developments will enable us to bring a more interactive experience to the field of puppetry. Although we are still in development and the details are “top secret”, the characters of KRAP will bring a more interactive experience to the screen both large and small.
We are scanning the characters into the computer using a 3D depth scanner that will allow us to manipulate them in 3D software much like the style of Pixar Toy Story etc.
Stay tuned for more exciting announcements, making of films and additional process shots coming this Thanksgiving.
With Phoenix Comicon 2011 just around the corner (9 days and counting), we thought it would be fitting to post some of our favorite moments from previous cons.
Having covered the event for several years now as well as being part of their annual film festival, it came as quite a shock to us last year to be ridiculed for our style of parody. Not by the organizers mind you (they’re not evil yet as best we can tell), but by the Star Wars costuming group’s own evil incarnate.
With immigration tensions at their peak and paranoia running deep in the Galactic Empire – even Jake of Avatar cannot escape the wrath of the dark side…or can he?
The one that started it all! Flesh Eating Ghouls From Outer Space began as a show for our annual Halloween party. We performed this show at the Great Arizona Puppet Theater and one night after wrapping the show, someone came up to me and said “I would pay to see that again!”. Music to any artists ears, we listened and turned up the volume. Pulling a few resources and favors together, we rented a studio for a day, and wished we had three later. The result is the freshman effort that leaves everyone singing “Only a Twinkie Will Do”.
We’re moving the website over to a WordPress blog to make content updates easier. Our old HTML website was a bit cumbersome to keep up with, so hopefully this will inspire some activity and regular posts. We have many projects in development and will be sharing them with you along the way. Hopefully some behind the scenes goodies to boot. And oh yeah, before I forget Georgann will likely want me to mention that we are working on a fan-club so check back often as we will be coming up with some giveaways and other fun stuff to hopefully bring you a little closer to the action.
