The Puppet Man animation was a concept I was creating with in Apple's compositing software Shake. I wanted to create a "digital puppet" if you will, and give an illustration and marionette feel to the animation. I am not a 3D animator but I have always enjoyed animation especially the 2D traditional animation process.

The traditional method of animation has always been a very tedious process, experimenting with it myself, I found it to be very time consuming. That's where the puppet man comes in. The puppet man process is to create a digital 2d marionette, a way of creating 2d animation without the tedious rotoscoping process.

By creating different pieces of the character I was able to using Shake's compositing and scripting techniques to string the character together and create a seamlessly flowing animation.

You can check out the movie here:

The Puppet Man macro is a plugin for Shake that creates a digital puppet allowing the user to animate 2D movements with sliders.

Click on the demo buttons below to see some of the animated screen shots taken while using this plugin.

Puppet Man parameters.


Script driven animation.