The Dwiggins Marrionnettes
me: I was happy with what I got for Christmas from my parents and Rachel.
a rare book for instance, that I've wanted for twelve years or so
: which one?
me: "The Dwiggins Marionettes: A Complete Experimental Theatre in Miniature" by Dorothy Abbe
infowidget: nifty. Sounds very interesting.
me: a gigantic and gorgeous book produced in a small print.*
check this out http://giam.typepad.com/100_years_of_illustration/2007/09/the-dwiggins-ma.html
infowidget: wow. Do you puppeteer at all?
me: only all my life.
infowidget: ah.
me: currently I'm managing a production of a puppet version of this for Penguicon: http://www.cthulhulives.org/Shoggoth/index.html
infowidget: :) awesome!
me: yes! It's so much fun to work on.
infowidget: Have you thought about doing that for a living?
wait. I'm sure you have.
me: that's what I tended to think about when I was a kid.
puppetry, animation, virtual reality, and such related pursuits.
I found out the animation industry is a committee-based system that eats creative idealists and crushes them into a slurry.
infowidget: really?
me: oh yes. absolutely.
infowidget: I have a friend that is involved in SIGGRAPH and he doesn't seem to describe things like that.
My friend Jim has been involved with them for years and seems to have such as fun time with it. However, animation/graphics/etc. is not his day job.
me: what does it mean to be "involved" with that event?
infowidget: I believe he's on the board.
me: I'm sure I would enjoy attending.
infowidget: Oh, I know you would.
me: One day in EPCOT Center, many years ago, my grandfather and I went into a preview of the virtual reality technology Disney was developing that they later used in their DisneyQuest interactive VR indoor park.
the staff picked me out of the crowd for one of the first consumer playtests of the Alladin carpet-ride VR simulator.
infowidget: Wow! That must have been amazing!
me: in the VR rig, I realized that medium would fuse all my most passionate childhood interests-- animation, puppetry, games, theme park rides, computers-- into a single art form.
I approached a staff member and told him I wanted to create environments. He told me there was no demand for anyone to create works in an art form that is still developing its tools, and that the only contribution I could make was with math and engineering to invent the tools.
infowidget: bleah. way to kill a dream there, buddy.
You know what? Widget's right. I did have a dream, and the letdown was not entirely reasonable. I was what, nineteen or so? The tools would get built in time for me to use them, and I should have figured out how to prepare myself rather than let the idea go. I bet I could eventually figure out how to get it back on track. I pretty much wrote off puppetry, animation and VR as a pipe dream, requiring a massive outlay of capital provided by a meddlesome corporation. But is it?
*It's an enormous coffee table tome, with actual photographic prints glued to archival pages, and indispensable instructions on creature-shop craftsmanship and reduced-scale stagecraft. Only four copies were made in the first printing. One is in the library of Pensacola Christian College, of all places. Another is in Oakland Library here in southeast Michigan. Fortunately there was an additional print run, so it was eventually affordable, even if it did take twelve years.
Comments
stormgren on Dec. 27, 2007 11:30 PM
Well, this is what design is for. Us mechanics just assemble it to spec. :)
And if you don't mind me asking, how do you know infowidget? It seems my social contact network has had its wave collapsed again.
matt-arnold on Dec. 28, 2007 4:43 AM
I met her at Ohio Linuxfest, where the Notacon and Penguicon tables were near each other.
temujin9 on Dec. 29, 2007 2:32 AM
There are possibilities of using the Wiimote as a controller. Three axes of motion sensing, plus several smaller controls to handle the parts usually done by tweaking individual wires, could cover everything that conventional string puppetry covers. And that's assuming you need real-time controls, which has only been feasible for photo-realistic models in the last five years or so. Thank you, video games, for turning collective American laziness into a patron for high-powered computing.
But yea, Blender. I've seen awesome things come out of it, but its learning curve seemed like a brick wall; possible to scale, but only if you really want what's on the other side . . .
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