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Digital Puppetry Project Using Quartz Composer » read article

posted by ian grant on February 12, 2007 at 11:11 pm | in installation, moving image, music, performance, quartz composer | 2 comments

I have recently completed the first prototype of a major digital puppetry project that relies heavily on Quartz Composer in an arena of live performance familiar to vj-ers, visual artists and visualists. I have a set of predefined visuals (‘scenes’) and effects and a complex mechanism that lets me composite my real-time singing mouth onto an a character that I (or someone else) can manipulate with a nintendo wii remote. Moving eyes are pre-recorded and in future versions, I indend for the eye movements to be controllable by the wii. The source code for the character control can be found elsewhere on this blog.

I do not intend to post the full patch as it is very dependent on other media, the wii controller and the Behringer midi controller, but you can view the root of the composition in the image below. I have split some of the more useful elements up and will be sharing them in other posts. I attempted (and will develop further) the idea of having a separate ‘buses’ for scenes, effects and transitions – a little like the way (I think) quartonian (and other vj-ing tools) work.

Image (1.8mb large): Screenshot of Root of Performance Composition

The project used some of the following ideas:

• instant chroma-keying and garbage matting of a performers blue face and the compositing of a hybrid character with live mouth and controllable pre-recorded eyes into multiple scenes
• midi control
• nintendo wii remote control of a virtual character (this meant I had to write a custom cocoa application to host the open source darwiinremote.framework ‘)
• Quasi 3D (or 2-and-a-half-D) effects derived from 2D frames – I’ll post some movies of this.
• Depth of focus and pulling focus effects
• Dynamic real-time titles

Some Images and Commentary

A fuller walkthrough of the final images with a commentary can be found here:

Screenshots and Scene-by-Scene Descriptions Link: http://www.daisyrust.com/quartzcomposer/moocher/

Image (above): Prototype of the Garbage Matte and Chroma-Keying Patch

Download Link: garbage_matte_bluescreen_demo_002.qtz.zip

This demo patch makes uses of Sam Kass’s excellent core image kernels available here:

Link: http://www.samkass.com/blog/

Images (above): Behringer BCF2000 MIDI controller controls scene sequencing and properties of various screen objects and parameters in real time

Image: Real-time Mouth / Recorded (controllable) Eyes Composited into an Image in Real-Time

Full credit and copyright acknowledgment to the Fleischer Brothers Estate for frame grabs and stylistic inspiration.