At one of the first conferences I ever helped put together, we did something not seen in most conferences of this nature… I created a virtual host, a digital puppet as it were. On the big screens, this little fella was a virtual MC that did most of the announcements, introductions, and segues into other portions of the event:

…on the back end, I had a library and menu that I used to control him in case the conference went off-schedule. He was also built flexible enough so that I could reprogram and animate him (which actually happened) on the fly. Keep in mind, this character had a voice (my own, digitally modified), so some of the emergency tracks were recorded in my room at the conference hotel, then fitted into the animation modules I’d built for the character. It was way more work than I ever expected, but the audience was really responsive… and most importantly not bored. It’s hard enough to get people to go from morning to night non-stop, but I think this added an element a lot of people had never witnessed (including myself).

Statistically, most experiments fail… but when they win it more than makes up for it.

Illustrator, Flash, Swift 3D, and a lot of audio programs to change my voice… I’ll upload one of the movies later on (and try to provide some context).

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 8:14 pm and is filed under 3D, Flash, Illustrator, Office, Desktop Publishing, Vector, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.