Challenges we went through during our installation
By Dustin Stephan & Team
Our major problems during installation were
- Tom snapping
- DMX lighting
- Tom’s Audio
- Animation correction
- Time crunch
We had a lot of planning moving into our installation that prepared us for the challenges that popped up.
Some of the animation challenges faced during install were :
- CONSISTENT ANIMATIONS – Before leaving for onsite in order to test out the different speeds Niharika had made half of the shows based on the 3rd iteration of animation (please refer to the blog Animation iterations) and half of the shows based on the 2nd iteration so that she could test out the animations and lock down the speeds. After testing onsite and finalizing the speed, Niharika had to ensure that there were all the shows were consistent in terms of speed and acceleration as if they were not then it would become a distraction for the audience during the show.
- TOM’S INTERACTIONS – Since Tom is in interacting with the audience and the volunteers more, we realized that Tom won’t be looking a lot to left side since the audience would be standing in front and the volunteer to the right. Since the crowds also varied as sometimes there would be just 1 or 2 families and sometimes the castle would be crowded. For this challenge Niharika then ensured that Tom looks more towards the volunteer and the audience and looks to the left few times. During our initial tests with Tom on the balcony we determined that he was not looking at the audience and there was no eye contact as the balcony was a bit higher. To fix this issue Alex Gobeler had an amazing feature in her design where we could move the torso a bit up and after we made that change it fixed Tom’s eye contact with the audience and the volunteer. We also had to keep in mind that since the audience mostly comprises of kids shorter in height Tom would be able to bend forward and make eye contact. But Niharika also made sure that Tom would look up and look around if there were family members accompanying the kids so that he could make eye contact with them too. Since Tom is also interacting with other characters in the castle like Joel the troll and Father time, Niharika had to ensure that he looked right at them while interacting or referring to them. Below are the pictures of father time and Joel the troll and the challenge was that Joel is really short in height and Father time is at a greater height. Therefore Niharika had to ensure that Tom would bend forward and look at Joel during the Welcome whereas for Father Time he would not bend forward and would simply tilt his head to interact with him during Goodnight show. This was important for our shows as it would help make the animatronic look more realistic and alive.
- SCEPTER HITTING THE HEAD– Another issue that we noticed during was that the scepter used to hit the head which would cause Tom’s hat to move out of the place and it would appear as if Tom is hitting his head with the scepter which kind of was a distraction. Therefore to fix this issue Niharika reduced the range and the speed and ensured that there were limited movements of the Scepter towards Tom as he would hit his head only when he would be bending forward and tilting the head at the same time.