Of Gods & Golems finally came to a close last week. It’s been a challenging year… between finding space, writing a thesis, and essentially doing the impossible: building a life-size stop-motion puppet. Tiger spent the better part of six months just trying to figure out how to make it, but she pulled some magic (as always), and he came out looking pretty amazing:
The Golem & The Greg
The puppet was the core kernel of the project, and I think even if that’s all we’d had, the concepts would’ve still worked. But we also put together a large public installation to showcase the piece, and although several ideas had to be left out of the final setup, I’m just glad that it all came together.
I suppose it’d be easy to assume that, since I was spending a lot of the time animating, the final video was the most important goal. But the point was really to emphasize the process of stop-motion, not the result, so we were more concerned with the physical presence of the puppet. The animation, while a great artifact of the event, doesn’t capture all of the interactions that happened during the show.
It did come out looking a lot smoother than I was expecting, though. I hadn’t programmed any way for me to compare previous frames, so I just had to guess how much to move the puppet. I thought this’d result in extremely jerky movement, but once I got into a rhythm it flowed easily.
I used Max/MSP again to run everything, and although the program actually wasn’t as complex as the one for Movement Is Life, it’s still a mess:
Click to enlarge
This is what my brain looks like.
