Mentioned in an Animation World Magazine article (2/99) I helped Brad with.

This is from a show we worked on: the "Virtual Ed Sullivan Show" (UPN, May '98.) They wanted a cute little mouse to act as an homage to Topo Gigio. Originally we were going to do a pain-in-the-ass rat, spitting and smoking cigars...!

My job was to design the mouse (modeling was done by Tracey Roberts), wire him up as a character, and then direct and puppeteer his performance. I also wrote a series of dynamic simulation plug- ins for our software, to add some procedural animation to him.

I was trying (successfully, I hope) to push our "cartoony" character movement quality at PZ to a new level. I think among the cartoony style projects we've done at PZ, I think this one came out best. I don't know if it's animation or not, but I do think it's fun, lively, and expressive.

The character took about three pain-in-the-ass weeks to build. But once that was done, I did the puppeteering, cleanup, facial performance, and procedural tweaks for this entire two minute performance, in about two days. We could do more stuff with it very quickly. Of course the reality is that we only used the character once, so in truth the process was horribly inefficient. Performance animation only becomes worth it if you're doing quite a bit with the same character. In this case, frankly, it wasn't worth it, but if we'd wanted to do even one or two more episodes it would have been.

Anyhow, whatever. It was a great opportunity, and it was also really challenging. It was quite an honor to get to puppeteer on the descendant of the real Ed Sullivan show.

(P.S.: the broadcast version of this segment had a very different voice dubbed off-sync over the original voice. Ah, such is life. :) )

The Ed Sullivan character was modeled by Tracey Roberts, wired up by Mike Morasky, and performed by John Byner; he is the best human character PZ has wired up.