Our Installation Overview By Dustin Stephan & Team A lot of preparation and planning went into our installation. The two week process was divided in half with the milestone of having our Grand Opening Show on the Friday of the first week. Although the scepter and lights were not Read more…
Our major challenge for this semester was to ensure that the animations were smoother. Last semester while working and testing out the animations we realized the animations were causing a lot of wear and tear on the animatronic which was a major distraction and made him look robotic rather than Read more…
For this semester we faced some old challenges from the previous semester as well new challenges before and during install. Some of the major challenges that we faced before install are as follows: SNAPPING/ JERKS IN ANIMATIONS – Our previous semester ended with the need for making the animations smoother Read more…
From our first onsite visit to Give Kids The World Village we were introduced to Father Time, a pneumatic driven animatronic in the form of a grandfather clock. The Village used this clock in their daily operation as a way to close down the Castle for the night at 9pm; Read more…
Another way in which we are iterating on our work from last semester is looking at Tom’s animation sequences. Niharika animated Tom in Maya using a 3D model of that was based of a scan taken from 2D pictures. The skeleton of the 3D model is matched 1:1 to the Read more…
Dustin was awarded the Creative Good Fund, an endowment through Carnegie Mellon University that allows the recipient to provide their services to a non profit for a summer. Naturally, he choose Give Kids The World; which allowed him to spend this past summer working on Tom Foolery and other projects. Read more…
Our project at the Entertainment Technology Center is different from others in that we are continuation from last semester, while also maintaining a core group of team members. This means that we started the term with in depth understanding of our goal and challenges ahead. This also means that as Read more…
Miracle Workshop 2.0 is a collaborative project with Give Kids The World Village, a nonprofit resort in Central Florida that provides cost-free vacations to children with life-threatening illnesses and their families. GKTW has reached out to us because they had a hand mechanized puppet that had not been in use Read more…