Digital puppets:Introduction Lessons

This school is:: Wikiversity Film School - Narrative film production

This course is:: The basics of narrtive film animation with digital puppets

Lessons in Digital Puppet Animation Course
Introduction:	Introduction to digital puppets
Lesson:	Character animation with digital puppets
Lesson:	Scenery Generation
Lesson:	Compositing characters & scenery
Lesson:	Dialog recording
Lesson:	Film scoring
Lesson:	Film editing

Animation using
Digital Puppets

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Getting started with Digital Puppets

If you want to do animation, I would like you to animate my movie "Seduced by the Dark Side!" using 3D cartoon figures. To do this, you will:

1. Use DAZ Studio (which is free) to do the character animation (not the movie set.)

2. Use Bryce 5.5 (which is free) to do the movie set animation.

3. Use cartoon animals from 3D Universe / DAZ Stuio. You have a choice of one of these models:

1. The Three Bears (The mother Bear and the Baby Bear)

2. Toon Penguins (A small Percy with a hat and scarf plus a big Percy)

3. Toon Croc (The same figure large and small but with different skin textures.)

Once you have tried DAZ Studio and if you like it, I will send you a gift coupon to purchase the 3D figures for the movie.

Things to do now:

If this sounds interesting then you need to:

1. Download DAZ Studio.

2. Download one of the free models from 3D Universe such as Staci or UG. (http://www.3duniverse.co.za/)

Casting

The first step will be to find the digital actors you want for your motion picture. This requires the same care as casting live action actors. You need to find the characters which help tell the story you want to tell.

When you select the characters, these characters will greatly shape the meaning of the motion picture.

Also the selection of the characters for your motion picture will decide what kind of voices you need for the characters.

As an example, look at the list of possible characters for this movie. See how each of the options gives a completely new feeling to the motion picture.

Select from the following Digital Puppets

Percy and Son

Here is a single figure from 3D Universe which is ideal for this story.

Big Croc and Little Croc

Here is a single figure from 3D Universe which is ideal for this story.

Kiki and Koshini

I don't have any public domain photos of Kiki or Koshini. There are digital puppet from Lady LittleFox. Neither comes with clothing. So the clothing must also be researched.

Who else?

Look at the websites for Poser, DAZ, and Runtime DNA to find other digital figures that you like.

Your first decision

Your first decision will be to locate the digital figures that you will want to use to make this motion picture. For figures without cloths, you also need to find the clothing.

Contact your instructor

Your instructor for this class is Robert Elliott. To email me, you simply Click Here.

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