Puppetry for the future

By FRANCIS TILL

Ventriloquism has been stuck in a rut for about 150 years, reckons globe-trotting funnyman David Strassman, who has enlisted the assistance of rocket scientists to launch it into the 21st Century by making his puppets into robots.

Strassman's puppets are unique in puppetry: they can carry on even when he's left the stage. What's more, he developed most of the technology himself.

"Back in 1985, I started messing around with a Commodore. In 1986, I was online with CompuServe and by 1987 I was paying bills online. My first website went up in 1995 or 1996," he says, flashing his internet bona fides.

Even in early days, he says, he was running his main puppet, Chuck Wood, with a hand-operated radio control system reconfigured from a model aircraft's remote control. "Chuck has servos [little motors] in him and I have this little hand-held piece that keys in movements," he says. "It's all wireless, but I was doing this years before I had computers in my show."

Running a puppet this way is like flying a model aircraft with a remote control transmitter that's designed to fit the hand like a golfing glove, except instead of extending flaps, the puppet might wink.

Strassman's still operates this way much of the time and plays the traditional voice-throwing ventriloquist.

But Strassman wanted to give Chuck and his other puppets optional "autonomy" - the ability to move and talk without a visible puppeteer - and that took the help of the American space programme. Back in the 1980s, with the help of a friend at Nasa (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), he developed a prototype computing device to record sequences of action electronically and associate them with digitised sound files. The result was then fed to Chuck through remote control transmitters.

It worked, but the kinds of computers available for the home market then weren't up to his vision. Still, he says, at that point he knew, "If I could record voices and add movements to those recordings, I could create anything".

As the technology developed, so did his uses for it - and Chuck got the option of nearly full autonomy.

The menagerie in his show is almost fully robotic, controlled wirelessly through a specially designed computer with two 10GB hard drives that outputs into a specially designed control box loaded with six top of the line radio transmitters. This isn't WiFi or any other fancy kind of bandwidth at work, but the basic frequencies used for remotely controlled toys like aircraft and cars. Still, it's powerful. Strassman says his puppets can be controlled wirelessly from up to a mile away.

He uses a joystick apparatus to record analogue movements as digital information to the hard drive, where special-purpose software then synchronises those movement files with sound files in 1/1000th of a second increments, tying animation to voice. His remotely controlled servos also give the little robots 1044 steps of movement in any 45 degree arc, which puts a lifelike fluidity into their movements.

The system gives him 48 channels of control, which is enough to move eight items on six puppets all at the same time. Because it's commonly used for toys, the radio frequencies he uses are not regulated, provided he keeps them at low enough power.

He does. "None of my signals leave the building," he says, meaning no car alarms will go off in venue parking lots when Chuck sneezes.

There are six "character" robot puppets in the show and three singing triceratops as well: small, perfectly formed little dinosaurs that compare favourably with anything in Jurassic Park (which may have something to do with the designer, who worked on that film), all operated wirelessly from the computer through the transmitter box.

"On a movie set," Strassman says, "it's easy to keep the wires out of frame. On a stage, it's impossible." And if it were being done with wires, the floor would look like snake spaghetti.

Strassman says he tried marketing the technology at one point, but says he found little commercial demand for speaking wireless robots capable of an almost infinite range of motion.



www.chuckwood.com