Puppets and Flash

[itchekadoozy]

so, I have this weekly jewish puppet show on the web (sheck out my link in my signature) and i want to make some educational flash games starring the puppets. i could go with cartoon versions (like sesamestreet.com), but i'd rather have the real puppets. The new muppets.com uses actual video clips (probably animated gifs or something like that imported into the flash) but that get's pretty heavy. I noticed that the sesame street stuff on noggin.com has real puppets of ernia and grover and bert and prarie dawn. I'm wondering if anyone knows the details behing those animations/videoclips. I think it's just one or two mouth clips of mouth movements synchronized appropriately for the sound. The trick is doing that well. Anyone have any know-how in that field? (any other creative ideas of how to pull this concept off would be great too!)

 

[Buck-Beaver]

I had a special program put together for doing puppetry in flash a few years ago, we never got to use it for anything other than demos; basically it grabbed keyframes from digital video footage shot at a high shutter speed (to prevent blurring) and made it really easy to import video files in to Flash so that they could be manipulated. The system works pretty well and it requires less memory than Flash video.

 

[itchekadoozy]

Ooooh!

I'd love to see what you're talking about. do you still have it? is it something I can download a trial version of etc.?

 

[Buck-Beaver]

I still have it, but I'm not really able to release it publicly, it was a custom program made for a proposed TV series/web site. I'm still not sure what's going to be done with the project ultimately and at the time this little add-in cost a lot of $ to get programmed so I really don't want to be giving it away. Sorry!

No one else has it, but anyone with an advanced knowledge of Flash MX could put together something similar. You could do the same sort of thing (albeit a little more slowly) using Photoshop and Flash. Just shoot greenscreen, import individual frames in to Photoshop, pop out the background and then import them in to flash.

The key to doing it well is shooting in a digital format with high resolution (which unfortunately costs money) and using a high speed shutter.

 

[itchekadoozy]

difficulties

to me, the biggest challenge seems to be pairing appropriate movement with the audio track, and keeping the amount of unique images (and thus the file size) to a minimum. Even performing motions live to pre=recorded audio poses the challenge of making the movements natural and believable; it's just not the same as moving that guy around while you talk- which sometimes feels like the puppet is just doing it on his own (spooky, eh? but i'm sure you know the feeling). Doing it manually with still images would obviously be a lot harder.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Not so, record your video (with sound) and then use the audio track in Flash and just eliminate unnecessary frames. It's also entirely possible to just import greenscreen (or bluescreen) video directly in to Flash I think. I haven't used MX 2004 yet, but I understand it makes working with video a breeze.