Digital Puppet Animation

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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

Digital Actors

Mostly free software

In this course, we will create a movie using Digital Puppets and a scenery generator.

For this course, I will recommend software which is free or very low cost. If you want to do more, contact me before you buy anything.

Basic requirements

DAZ Studio for character animation - free
Bryce 5.5 for scenery generation - free
AfterEffects (not free) for compositing

Introduction

This course: Digital Puppet Animation

History: Digital Puppets (also know as Poser figures) is a unique form of 3D animation. We will use digital puppets to create a motion pictures based on everything you have learned so far.

Prerequisites: To begin this class, you must have completed all the other courses. This is because you will need the animatic which you created in the course on Basic Filmmaking which relies on the editing course and the film scoring course.

Animation vs. Live Action: When you attend film school, you will learn all about live action filming. You will learn to work in a team and become a team player.

Therefore, for this course, you will work alone to create the entire motion picture by using digital actors on your personal computer.

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.