Be sure to check out this video from earlier in the year when our work was displayed at the Art Center NABI in downtown Seoul in Korea. We are glad to see that the puppets can endure the freezing cold and also very excited by how great they look in the Art Center’s screens.

A video demonstration of how to use our software!

A quick video describing how we user tested and how we used the results.

In 3 minutes, we describe our project and our goals:

Our project in 30 seconds!

Depero Futuristi is hard at work after their performance in New York City on November 12th.  As part of the Performa 09 Festival, we presented our re-imagining of Fortunato Depero’s Balli Plastici as directed by Franco Sciannameo.  We had a great turnout!  We also did a live demonstration of the software we developed and used to create the show.  Afterwards, we had a lot of awesome questions and interest from the crowd.  We’re very proud of our accomplishments and are happy we could bring something entertaining to the table at Performa.

After returning from New York, we completed our first guest test.  We invited people from the ETC Pittsburgh community to come to our office and get some hands-on experience with our software.  The feedback we collected based on those experiences has been invaluable in charting our course for the rest of the semester (only 2 weeks more!).

After condensing and talking through the feedback, we were able to prioritize modifications to the existing software as well as new features we’d like to implement.  Now we’re working hard to not only make the software as fun as possible, but to ready it for public release at the end of the semester.

Also, this software now has a name!  Meet Toybox Futuristi.

As we approach the end of the semester, we will also be writing a post-mortem of our experience and process developing Toybox.  We hope that we will be able to appear at several conferences in the coming year to present our work in digital puppetry.

From the start of the semester, we knew that there were in fact two deliverables we needed to achieve.  The first is our showing of Franco Sciannameo’s Balli Plastici interpretation at the Performa 09 festival in New York, while the second is to develop a puppetry software that anyone can download and use to create their own interpretation of Fortunato Depero’s marionette work.

These deliverables are quite different from eachother and demand different things from our seven person team, so we thought it would be nice to give our readers some insight into the decisions we’ve made thus far.

In order to maximize our progress on each deliverable simultaneously, we decided early on that we would use our own software to build our performance for the festival.  Once we had built a stable, functional version of the software, we began recording acts and scenes in earnest.  Our own heavy use of the tool is currently informing our designs for features we plan to incorporate after the performance.  That is to say, now that we have used our own software frequently for work on the Performa show, we have a lot of great ideas of what the final version of the software should have!  Giving ourselves time to build the software allowed us to complete meaningful work towards both the performance and the eventual release of our puppetry program.

According to our own interpretation of Futurism itself, we felt it was important to make sure anyone could use our software.  With this in mind, we knew we didn’t want our software to act as a full-featured animation package (like Autodesk Maya, for instance).  Rather, we focused on a balance of providing animations for each puppet and allowing the user to have fun moving the puppets instead of focusing on detailed, frustrating minutiae that make the learning curve so difficult in professional animation.  Knowing that we wanted the software to have this level of accessibility, we developed a user interface focusing on simplicity and ease of use.  Our challenge there is making sure each option is clear while not providing a ton of confusing buttons for each feature.  While we had discussed a variety of input devices – such as Wiimotes or analog sliders – to actually move the puppets around, we ultimately chose a standard mouse and keyboard, which we knew would be available in most households.

This focus on simplicity and accessibility has allowed us to create a reasonable plan for the development of our software over the course of the 16-week semester.  With such a short development period, it’s very important that we balance our vision for what the software could be so that it is still achievable by the end, while still making it fun to use, and also leaving time for designing our performance in New York.  Designing the experience that the audience will have from the moment they enter until the moment they leave is also an important consideration as we near the performance date.

You can probably imagine how using all of our team’s talents in parallel has helped us throughout the semester!

The Depero Futuristi team has been working hard for the upcoming Performa 09 screening of Balli Plastici at the Museum of Arts and Design!  The event is now less than two weeks away, and the tension in our room is getting higher…  We are all so excited!
Here is our flyer/postcard which includes all the info about the event. Please take a look and tell us what you think.
You can find the postcards at various locations in NYC, including the Museum of Arts and Design and the Performa 09 booth at Cooper Union.