For the Boss Level this trimester, students are creating a play together. The idea behind the theme is to introduce system and components, and to create relationships between them. All kinds of workshops are provided to take students through different aspect of a stage play, such as script writing, site design, light design, prop design, and character design. To celebrate the theme and system thinking, in SMALLab we put on a real-time digital puppet show, named Quellywood. The characters are borrowed from Systemia, another very popular trimester theme at Q2L New York.
Students are divided into teams and each team collaboratively acts out a puppet show in SMALLab. A team consists of 2 puppeteers, 2 prop masters, 1 voice actor, and 1 director. Puppeteers use the SMALLab controllers to act with the digital puppets. They can create different facial expressions on their puppet by moving the controller up and down in SMALLab. Prop masters are in charge of sound effects, props, and the backdrops of the show. The voice actor and the director are usually the same person who dubs and keeps the team in sync with their script. They will spend the first 15 mins of the session to write a story. An online version of the Quollywood is available to them as a simulator during the writing. Afterwards, they rehearse their script once in SMALLab, make some last-minute changes,and go into the official recording. Projection screen, including sound effects and voice-overs, is recorded while they act out the whole play, we then corp out the stage area and publish the show to Youtube and BeingMe.
In this play experience, we have built in a few mechanisms that requires players to communicate with each other in order to put on a successful play. There is a special sound effect that requires both prop masters to trigger certain backdrops in a specific sequence. There are tricks to create seamless prop exchange between the two puppets and they are heavily relied on the synchronization between puppeteers and prop masters. Voice actor has to work with puppeteers to sync the voice-overs with the mouth animation.
Step 1: Writing and Simulating
Step 2: Rehearsing and Iterating
Step 3: Recording and sharing
The cheer at the end is real! That is all of us in the room congratulating them a job well done! A urban fairy tale in 45 mins!