Backstage

The kids did a great job creating PERSPECTIVES, so we’d like to share a little bit about how they did it.

Our workshop started by examining a simple animatronic raccoon named Raffles. Raffles has only two degrees of freedom - he can move his mouth, and he can turn his head. But that’s enough to be quite expressive. Using Raffles, we explored how one programs an animatronic figure using Visual Show Automation.

Next, we started thinking about the characters we would have in our show. We had three hand puppets - a cat, a pig and an elephant. For each, we imagined what their personalities might be, and thought about what motions might best express them. We also thought about what sort of show we might put together.

Probably the hardest part of the class was learning how to build the mechanisms that go inside the puppets. These consist of model airplane servo motors mounted on custom made aluminum frames. The kids learned how to cut, punch, nibble and bend the aluminum to shape using simple hand tools. We divided into three teams. The 8th graders did the cat, the 7th graders did the elephant and the 6th graders did the pig.

When the mechanisms were completed, they were mounted on a stage. The kids came up with a nice design for the stage, painted it, and created some props. They also had to mount all of the electronics and power supplies on a board which sits under the stage.

In the midst of all this activity, a script was completed, and some of the kids auditioned for speaking roles, while the others served as judges. We recorded the actors individually, and pieced it all together later adding sound effects and background music.

Once we had the audio tracks, the final step was to program the control tracks. Each team did the motions for their character. The result was three animatronic characters putting on a terrific show!