Concept

The concept for this digital puppet show emerged from my fascination with Victorian-era shadow puppetry and modern 3D rendering techniques. I wanted to create a modern interpretation of this traditional art form by combining the charm of shadow puppets with the capabilities of contemporary digital tools. I enjoyed the idea of combining 2D and 3D art forms. Considering a paper puppet show would include a theatre box with paper puppets, I believed creating the theatre in 3D and the puppets in 2D was a balanced way to mix these two formats while imitating a real life puppet show.

Concept Art

Storyboard

This play tells the story of "The Children of Lir" an irish folklore story. I put together this storyboard so I could break the story down to a simplified version.

I used the creation of this storyboard to carefully breakdown each scene and understand how I wanted the story to flow. This was an important step in the process as it helped me to understand the scope of this project, I knew how many assets I needed to bring the story to life.

The Stage

Animation

The animation process combined traditional puppet movement principles with modern digital techniques. I used rigging systems in After Effects to simulate the jointed movement of traditional shadow puppets.

Each character was carefully animated to preserve the characteristic "stiffness" of shadow puppets while still conveying emotion and narrative. I decided to add multiple different moving parts of the set. These acted as props and gave the scene more depth.
I wanted the different backdrops to drop in between scenes as it emulates how a real life puppet shop would change between scenes.