I think that the IT guy might be intentionally creepy, those tiny blinking eyes are unsettling. I'm just glad they aren't like those latex Muppets from The Jim Henson Hour. Those things still creep me out.
The Muppets
- Thread starter Kirby
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Are you referring to Muppets, or Creatures?
http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Muppets_vs_Creatures
Not trying to be pedantic, just to get a better understanding of your comment. The Jim Henson Hour was generally split in half between the Muppet TV segments and the more Creature-oriented stuff like The Storyteller, and I'm unclear on which half you're referring to.
Meet Digit, he was on the MuppeTelevision segments of The Jim Henson Hour and in the nightmares of any child who saw him.
I'm actually kind of enjoying Miss Piggy as the main antagonist.
Hopefully as it goes along it may re tool to spoof and subvert actual TV shows, as Christopher suggests, a highlight of the old Muppet Show.
Ah, Digit.... (shudder) one of the few 1990s memories that stayed successfully buried.
Hopefully as it goes along it may re tool to spoof and subvert actual TV shows, as Christopher suggests, a highlight of the old Muppet Show.
Ah, Digit.... (shudder) one of the few 1990s memories that stayed successfully buried.
Digit looks like he's made of the usual foam material used for Muppets, at least the solid ones like Piggy or Bunsen rather than the felt ones like Kermit. Then again, that is foam latex.
It's a form of foam latex called polyfoam, it's basically the same material that foam cushions are made from. It's easy to cut and shape. They then either cover it in felt, fur or run an electric charge through it and cause particles of fabric to stick to the glue covered foam.
Digit may actually be cast in foam from a mold, his skin was shiny and smooth. I think they were going to the idea that he's a CG character that escaped the computer. Henson was doing some early work with CG at that time and seemed to be fascinated with it.
I'm rather enjoying the show so far. It's different, and it doesn't always work - e.g. I think Piggy tends to be too harsh to make her inherently narcissistic character endearing (contrast with, say, Muppets Take Manhattan). But I like the new approach and some of the character interactions (Kermit & Fozzie were great - funny and touching, too). It's leaps and bounds better than Muppets Most Wanted - at least the Muppets aren't relegated to witless patsies. Here's hoping for a touch more of the zany vaudevillian roots ... but otherwise, this is a show that, so far, I look forward to every week.
I loved the bit with Kermit where he admits that he never noticed how irritating Piggy was when they were dating. I do think that it's in character for her though. This is Miss Piggy trying to stay relevant in the age of social media and constant celebrity gossip. They would probably make it bit more shocking if they could get away with it and it would be in character for her.
I always took him for a pastiche of Data from ST:TNG. The name, skin tone, and eyes are rather similar, and the show debuted two years after TNG. The Muppet Wiki describes him as "semi-robotic."
There was an actual CG character that debuted in The Jim Henson Hour, Waldo C. Graphic. He was designed to work like an actual digital puppet, performed by a puppeteer in real time through a sort of crude performance capture; there's a video explaining it in the linked article.
My experience with the CG Waldo was from Muppet Vision 3D at Disney. He's sufficiently zany, and I've always enjoyed the Disney attraction (the waiting room reel is probably the funniest aspect of the attraction). But the juxtaposition between the CG presentation and the traditional Muppets has never really been something I enjoyed.
It's a bit weird, but it is fascinating that Henson saw CG as a tool as early as the 1980s. The owl in the Labyrinth opening credits is CG because they couldn't train an owl to do what they wanted and they couldn't get a puppet to look right flying. The equipment used for Waldo is the prototype for what the Henson company uses on their CG children's shows like Sid the Science Kid. They perform the head and mouth moments with a rig that looks like a puppet mouth while performers act out the body movements at the same time, similar to how they would use a performer and animatronics for a larger creature character. It's a lot quicker than having to animate it like a traditional CG cartoon.
^ No doubt Henson saw CGI as an evolution of puppeteering. And when presented within the context of its own production, the results can certainly be effective. But, as yet, CGI hasn't advanced to the point where it can (plausibly) coexist with live-action puppets (the exception of Gollum notwithstanding).
Kudos to Henson for pushing the envelope and embracing the new technology. Too bad it has yet to be completely and successfully integrated with traditional puppetry.
Kudos to Henson for pushing the envelope and embracing the new technology. Too bad it has yet to be completely and successfully integrated with traditional puppetry.
Actually, I wasn't even really thinking of the IT guy when I said that, even though he is, though I understood the reason for it.
I was actually thinking about the new women muppets. They just look a little weird to me, a bit too much of a human-like design.
Henson was always a technological innovator. He was the first TV puppeteer to abandon the traditional proscenium arch/stage and use the TV frame itself as the proscenium, to rely on camera angles alone to hide the puppeteers and thereby free puppet characters to move freely through the environment. He loved experimenting with television, electronics, special effects, and the like. He pioneered remote-puppeteered animatronics. Henson always saw puppetry as just one of the tools in his kit, and his interest in CGI was just an extension of the innovation he'd been engaged in for decades.
I think you're forgetting a little film called Jurassic Park. Most of its dinosaur shots were live-action animatronics -- essentially puppets -- but the CGI shots matched and meshed so well with them that most viewers couldn't tell where the puppets left off and the CGI began (leading to the unfortunate myth that they were pure CGI). And that was decades ago. By now, there have been many films with convincing CGI characters integrated with live action (like the new Planet of the Apes films), and most action movies use lifelike digital doubles of their actors in special-effects shots (though they're more convincing in some cases than others).
I'm sure it would be easy to create an all-digital Kermit or Piggy that would look convincing, but the makers of the recent Muppet movies consciously chose to do it old-school. Although if Henson were still alive, he would've most likely been on the vanguard of digital character creation.
There's really no need to do an all CG Kermit or any other Muppet. They've gotten extremely advanced in just hiding the performers. You'll notice that the control rods are no longer visible with the Muppets and they regularly will use multiple puppeteers controlling a single puppet and just remove them digitally. That's how they do the shots of Fozzie standing and moving now. All the scenes of Constantine fighting people from Muppets Most Wanted were done this way. It's really a pretty old form of puppetry, it's just been adapted to work with modern movies and shows.
^Right. If Henson had lived and continued to experiment with CG character creation, he probably would've pushed it into types of characters that wouldn't have been feasible with puppetry, rather than just replicating what could already be done physically. I'm not sure what that would be -- maybe some kind of translucent creature, or a disconnected assemblage of free-floating parts, the sort of thing Henson occasionally experimented with using chromakey and video effects. But for actual Muppets, it makes far more sense just to digitally erase the puppeteers, rods, wires, etc.
No, I haven't forgotten it. Not one bit. I'm not talking photorealistic characters (the recent Planet of the Apes film was exquisite in its depiction of Caesar and his people). But to my eye, though, I've yet to see a digital creation that could stand alongside a traditional, live-action puppet in such a way that it isn't obvious which is which.
That isn't to say Henson wouldn't have kept innovating. Nor does it suggest that he couldn't have accomplished the feat. Nor does it suggest that CGI is inherently inferior to traditional puppets. But, as yet, I've not seen any digital creation that looked like it could have replaced traditional puppetry (in the style of the Muppets, since that's the topic of conversation here).
Err... why would you want to? The only reason to make a CGI character or object look indistinguishable from a real one is if you need it to do something that a real one can't -- like have an ape speak English or have a superhero fly through the air. There's not much you can't do with a puppet.
Like I said, the reason for adding CG characters to a Muppet or Creature repertoire is to complement puppets, not just duplicate them -- to do character types that couldn't be done with puppetry. You wouldn't want them to be indistinguishable from one another, because then there would be no point in the exercise.
Innovation is not about "replacement." Adding a new tool to the kit does not require throwing an old one out. That's the mistake too many filmmakers have made about CGI, and fortunately the industry is starting to recognize that it was a mistake and to go back to using practical techniques for the things that are best done practically. CGI is for the stuff you can't do any other way.
I think the new Star Wars is going to blow us away with what can be done with practical and CG effects. Based on what has been released, a few characters are animatronic but the performance is done by motion capture. So instead of controlling a CG character, it will be a physical puppet.
