I have a background in puppetry and computer graphics, so when I first heard of a group that was combining the two, I wrote and asked for a job.
Protozoa, an offshoot of Colossal Pictures, is a technology and entertainment company that specializes in "real time character animation." To animate our characters, we wear a suit of sensors the computer can follow, allowing us to literally act out their movements (a technique also known as "motion capture.") It can be a lot of fun-- imagine looking in a mirror and seeing yourself as you make different movements-- except that in the "mirror" (computer screen), you're an orange dog, or a crafty monkey. We also do some characters that are far from human shape; for instance we've made a worm and a spider. With a very human shaped character, the technique feels almost like acting; with non human characters it feels just like puppetry.
This is very different technique than is used in most computer animation (and, for that matter, drawn, sculpted, or painted animation). Predictably, there are both benefits and problems. Aesthetically, motion capture does not easily produce the kind of wild exaggeration and dramatic motions that are so important in normal animation-- people just don't move like that! As such, motion capture doesn't suit some cartoon characters well-- Daffy Duck done with motion capture wouldn't be anywhere near as funny. However, it easily reproduces little tiny gestures, shrugs of the shoulder, subtle body language, and a sense of weight and mass-- which take great talent to represent well with keyframe animation or stop-motion. I think there are certain kinds of characters, and certain kinds of stories, that this more naturalistic motion suits well. We're really only at the beginning of exploring what motion capture animation is good for and what kinds of characters work well with it.
Compared to doing "real" puppetry, there are pluses and minuses. It's very hard to reproduce some things that with real puppets you take for granted. Hair is a real problem, and reacting physically to other characters (hitting or pushing them, for instance) is extremely hard to do well. However, there are some really amazing benefits. It's possible to play back one character's motions while performing another, and easy to scale things up or down to any size or position you want. I recently did a skit where I acted out a character AND a devil and angel sitting on his two hands, by layering my performances, doing one at a time. In the past, I've performed as many as ten puppets in the same scene this way.
There's really no substitute for the sense of excitement that comes from bringing a real inanimate object to life, of course. I still do some puppetry with live materials just because it's so much fun.
When I describe what we do, one of the first things I usually get asked is, how do you make money off that? One of the main ways we keep things running is by making characters for TV shows. We've had a hyperactive dog named "Moxy" as a host on the Cartoon Network, a gnome on a daily kids' show in Germany, and a commentator named "Dev Null" on a technology show. We're also now doing a lot of internet-based work; you can download animations of ours in "VRML-2" format and see them in 3-D on a desktop PC. We also make animations available in QuickTime.
If you're interested in more, and you have WWW access, check out Protozoa's home page, at http://www.protozoa.com. You might also be interested in my personal web page which has a lot of puppetry stuff, and more about motion capture, on it: www.digitalpuppetry.com.
Emre Yilmaz