- Joe (Puppet Constructor):
- Blog
- My Idea
- About Me
- Judge's Comments
Round 1
When you look at how well something like Comic Life did, it’s not hard to appreciate Puppet Constructor. The contestant has posted quite a few cool ideas, and, if nothing else, it would be a fun way to not get things done.
Computer animation is tough. To do anything more simple than a flip book, you need to learn a whole set of tools and conventions, not to mention the tools for drawing the images in the first place. If it contained a library of puppet parts and allowed easy combining and animating, Puppet Constructor would have the opportunity to lower the barriers to animation, allowing anyone to create simple and fun compositions. An interesting addition would be to allow for real-time streaming to iChat under Leopard.
The entire appeal of this app lies in its simplicity. This is definitely one where if power is going to be added, it MUST be done without adding any additional user interface complexity.
Basically, I think this should just consist of pre-built puppet parts that can be hooked together “Mister Potatohead” style. Existing or user-defined colors, textures, OR VIDEO can be applied to the parts, and the parts can be stretched or condensed.
Note the mention of video. What I’m referring to here is the ability to replace the face with, for example, a short video of a thumb puppet, or your boss yelling, or something fun like that. And I don’t know why you’d want to texture a puppet leg with video, but if you can do it the face, you may as well be able to do it to a leg, too!
The parts should move along well-defined paths, with correlations between movements possible. For example, someone suggested something along the lines of making the eyebrows raise when the mouth smiles. This is a good idea.
Finally, I like the idea of leaving a process resident that will periodically animate your puppets across your workspace when you least expect it. Like, your most recent puppet might walk on stilts across your Pages document a few hours after you finished working with the puppet. :)
Sounds fun. I’m always in favor of mindless entertainment. The challenge is taking this idea beyond being a novelty.
As a child I loved to play with The Newsroom (for C64) and similar programs which allowed me to produce something which looked (relatively) professional.
So I would put emphasis on making it easy to produce something which looks good. Ideally it would offer templates and characters from popular cartoons such as South Park, but likely this would result in trademark problems.
It is however an angle which would broaden the appeal of Puppet Constructor.
This sounds pretty fun, really. Not sure if there are enough axes of input to make interesting puppets, but it’d be fun as heck to try. One could also hook up a bunch of mice to a single computer and map them to different movements, and have a wild time animating a movie with a bunch of friends. I like this idea.