Free Pixel

For whatever reason, The Muppet Show DVDs only made it recently into our collection. Ever since we are working our way through 70s puppet bliss. In somewhat of a continuation of the limitations of the game engine this post will ask whether Machinima would ever be up for something like a Muppet Show program.

No doubt, the live and play elements are two of the unique selling points of Machinima and there were a range of shows that experimented with it: This Spartan Life, Tra5hTa1k and the Campaign Trail shows by the ILLclan, even the Bob Block show. Strangely enough all of them are on somewhat of a hiatus and I am not aware of any other live shows at the moment but would love to hear about more of them (so please comment). All the technical conditions are there: two revolutionary animation techniques, dedicated communities behind both of them, both have qualities of live TV formats …

So why is there no machinima Muppet Show?

One point is closely related to the technically defined issues of expression that hovered of the last post. The problem with basically all Machinima engines is that they strife in one way or the other to offer photorealistic imagery (below one of the Far Cry 2 comparisons).

The puppets in The Muppet Show are not perfect. In fact, their imperfections are one reason why they are so lovable. We embrace them as individual characters because they show their “flaws” as part of their character traits. Because each puppet is unique, each unrealistic “flaw” is unique and interesting. The Muppet Show is a variety show not only of brilliant puppetry, comedy, and music - but also of continuously changing imperfections. As one example, let’s look at hand control in three different puppets:

Kermit’s rod-controlled hands flap around (giving him the excited expression whenever he announces one of his guest stars) while Rowlf’s fingers in the gloves of his puppet literally seem to play the piano (which allows him to have numbers where he literally does little more then playing a classical piece with small comedic moments). One of the piano playing puppeteers - Steve Whitmire - mentioned that

One of my favorite things to do, ever, in my career has been to do Rowlf’s hands on the piano, which is something that other people had done, but once I started doing it, I kind of have done it since… It’s the best job in the world for somebody who sort of plays the piano, but would really like to play the piano well…you can approximate what it’s supposed to be and make it look really good.

And finally there is Dr. Teeth, who takes this set up even further with extendable arms. All three characters originally were played by Jim Henson himself - all three work differently - all three are non-realistic and the differences between them make it interesting to look at them.

Compare this to the repetitive perfection of the Master Chief or the mo-cap libraries of other tools. Admitted, the more physics enter the animation system, the less repetitive the movements get, but the problem of realism remains. The holy grail in game animation still seems to be the fact that the character puts down his foot properly on a somewhat deformed surface - not the option of doing a ballet jump.

A second point might be timing

The Bob Block and ILLClan shows depend on relatively advanced live puppeteering systems. Operators control mouth, individual arms, gaze etc. to far greater detail then in closed systems (such as Halo in the case of This Spartan Life). But for some reason we rarely give our characters time to breath in these live shows. Traditional machinima movies are better (see the timing in Red vs Blue or Clear Skies) but our live show timing is usually very high paced. The ILLClan even succeeds in bringing in a comparable kind of stand-up comedy into their shows that at times equals The Muppet Show’s writing. But it is a sign of their limitations that even the ILLClan does not manage to depict calmer moments in their show - a regular feature in The Muppet Show, that moves expertly between comic mayhem and reflective calmness. Again, it is the variety of expressions that carry the change. One changes not only from one number to the next but also from one animation method to another.

This change is not available in machinima. Even Sid the Science Kid with its real-time animation control and Henson credentials uses the same system for all characters. Here they are, lip-synching and doing facial animations:

Conceptually, this mirrors the TV-specific puppeteering control of The Muppets. Henson developed that approach where the puppeteer controls the puppet while looking at a TV screen showing the camera’s view. But in contrast to the Muppets all these controls are the same for different characters. The characters in Sid are usually human kids and the controls might be just fine for that, but one still wonders whether this is not the end of variety in performance if the interface is streamlined. And that is exactly the case in video games.

Another challenge to machinima variety shows is the inclusion of real actors. It is a constant source for comedic interaction in The Muppet Show, with guest stars joking all the time about the differences between puppets and real humans - while Kermit steadfast considers his troupe “real”. This Spartan Life tries to offer the element of celebrity guests but only their voice truly remains in the show. Yes, guests might have different play styles, prefer different weapons for a shoot out, chose different Halo characters as their representation … but all this dwarfs in comparison to what the Muppets do to their guest stars on a regular basis. They actively use the difference between real and virtual, turn humans into puppets and puppets into humans. After all, Dr. Teeth was modelled after Elton John and when he did his show for the Muppets, it seems completely normal that Elton and Miss Piggy do a duet.

The question of acting in VR has been targeted in academia but how to structure a possible combination of real vs virtual remains a question.

Sure, there are a number of real-time puppeteering events that use some kind of video compositing to combine the computer with the real world image. Here at Georgia Tech we played ourselves with Augmented Reality and Improvisation theater but the virtual remains floating on top of the real (or behind, depending on your set up). The very same unique magic that allows Rowlf to shake hands with a real person or Elton John to look into Piggy’s eyes is missing. Not only is a handshake ridiculously difficult to control on the virtual side, but we obviously lack the physical contact.This kind of “meeting space” between the real and virtual is a difficult area to explore in machinima.

So why lamenting about these problems (and I am sure there are a ton more)?

Because I believe that the variety show would be one thing Machinima could do that a real-time Maya application could not do. It certainly is a difficult task that poses technical and conceptual challenges but we  see real-time stuff coming out of Autodesk now and we have to find the niches where machinima can deliver the goods and Maya cannot.