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Cheap Pneumatic Video Puppet Dolls
Affordable, simple, pneumatically operated puppets, available in a range of characters and body/face types. Mobile phone video camera production, for the use of. | |
It occurs to to me that there is currently a provision for both creating and hosting audio visual motion picture art, freely and easily - freeer and easier than any prior generations have ever had it. Admittedly, anyone of any age in the past hundred years or so could have sketched out a short play or
skit on paper and practiced it with friends. If they were lucky enough to know someone who knew someone with parents that might have a cine camera, this could then be put into production, but at a fair amount of cost and effort.
Currently, this situation is more or less reversed. Most phones are able to shoot video with synchronised audio. The immediate and free of cost result can be published to the entire world with ease. However, the planning and writing phase of the sketch or scene is now diminished, and there is a lot of experimentation visible in the end-product that in previous generations would be the kind of disposable familiarisation exercises that one passes through whilst practicing with the production tools.
One ramification of that is that there is an identifiable compulsion to produce plays of short duration, and bearing no particularly strong message other than simply spectator-oriented humour value. Fair enough. One can either use your friends to adopt parts, or if you have no friends, you can use plastic toys - surely you have some of those, instead.
The incidence of short and relatively pointless videos featuring close-up action of plastic dolls or toys, with a live voice-over, is quite high - it is obviously an accepted art form, and obviously presents a low barrier to entry for assembling a short play with more than one character in it.
The trouble with plastic dolls and toys is that they have to be moved by hand, and their mouth or face isn't particularly mobile. Some would say this adds to the charm, but I would say that this is a deficiency.
I propose a range of puppet doll maquette characters (some may be human of various character types, some may be superhuman, some may be animals, obviously dinosaurs and various ape types would need to be featured as they are among the new media prime stars). These puppet dolls would have simple hand-operated controls that are pneumatically operated via tubes, enabling manipulation of facial features, limbs, etc. The group of tubes could be manipulated off-camera, out of view. Ideally, these dolls would be highly customisable and to a certain extent, interchangeable. Their primary identified purpose is for low-end (ie, mobile phone) multimedia production work, but their price point is such that youngsters could easily afford a few, if not more.
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I think this needs USB connectivity. Go
for a standard set of hydraulics on all
models - say 16 channels (16 tubes).
This need not limit you to 16
movements, since some of the channels
could act as hydraulic actuators for
hydraulic valves. A little internal
hydraulic logic would then afford a wide
range of movements. |
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Next, you need a USB/hydraulic
interface (UHI). This can consist simply
of a single pump and 16 electronically-
operated hydraulic valves, and need be
no larger than a demigerbil. The UHI
has a standard USB connector, and
multiple UHIs can of course be
connected to a suitable hub. |
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Then, the entire sequence of
movements can be choreographed on
the computer, rather like a midi
sequence. |
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Of course, some good software would
be needed to build the movement
sequence. However, one could also
incorporate motion sensors (or,
perhaps, fluid pressure sensors) to
record positions made by "posing" the
mannequins. These positions could
then be edited, looped, interpolated or
procorroborated in software to generate
a smooth movement sequence. |
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Nice, but again, the barrier to entry creeps higher the cleverer you pour technology in. |
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I'd be content to have it 'glove' operated, whereby a symmetrical glove* could allow five motion expressions - one per finger - that you could plug and connect to any of perhaps about eight possible movable things. You decide which five of the eight you want to be expressable. |
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Your idea for the USB to hydraulic interface could indeed work as a 'high end' add-on product, but it should be workable on the simple cheap manual level too. |
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* symmetrical glove being a design which allows right handed people to use it in their right hand, as well as normal left handed people to use it properly in the first place. Probably doesn't need to be an enclosed glove - more like piston actuators and pivoty-fulcrum things that have generic hook and loop fastener straps so that they simply strap to your finger joints, but are webbed together to stay more or less glove orientation, rather than taking it out of a drawer and spending 45 minutes untangling it like one does with headphones on ones phone on the train. I could do the generic hook and loop fastener straps up one way, and a right-handed person would take them round the other side and do them up the other way for a right-handed glove set. Same equipment, strapped up the other way. |
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You have spent many paragraphs and many, many words inventing the puppet, a thing that has existed as long as mankind. There are exits N,S,W. |
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I really like MaxwellBuchanan's suggestion of USB-operated hydraulics - that could be a whole new genre. |
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Ian says that's too complex; okay. But you started it with .. |
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> hand-operated controls that are hydraulically operated via tubes, enabling manipulation of facial features, limbs, etc. |
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Unless I'm wrong about what you're suggesting, *that* looks like the expensive part to me.
Actual hydraulics are error-prone, difficult to maintain, yet extremely powerful - which is completely useless when all they do is manipulate a puppet's face. |
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Are you imagining some clever mechanism that I'm not yet seeing? What would make this cheap? |
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It's cute, but five controls don't give you much unless the puppet is just a head. Marionettes actually end up having more than 5 movements due to the multiple attachment points and variable stick configurations. I think it would be better and certainly cheaper to sell marionettes. If you did this idea with just a head it might work. One to control the opening of the mouth, another for the shape of the mouth, (smile/frown) one for the furrowing of the brow, one for the eyes and an extra for something else. The hand in general would control where the head looks. Oh cr&$%, I just invented a ventriloquist’s puppet. Never mind. |
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I've just discovered that the term 'hydraulics' doesn't encompass pushing air through tubes - it's liquids only. For air through tubes, it'd be 'pneumatics'. So I've edited the copy. So those toy plastic jumping spiders we used to have when I were a lad must've been pneumatic then. |
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I like this - I want to stick pins... |
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You don't want to be doing this with
pneumatics if you can avoid it.
Pneumatics are great if you want
movement to a fixed limit, but they are not
so good for controlled movement between
limits. The problem is that air is
compressible, so the movement you get
depends upon the resistance. You're
better off with hydraulics, as per the
original posting. |
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