At the beginning of this year I worked with Bigfish to develop a 3D character which was to be the live MC at an annual gala dinner function for construction company Laing O’Rourke. The event, held at the Gold Coast Convention Centre was called Extraordinary 2, and was attended by about 1300 people who were treated to a few hours of entertainment. Sheldon and I sat behind the curtains operating our character, Wert, who appeared on 8 projector screens around the stage to introduce the acts and the speakers. Sheldon is the voice of Wert and he operated the head, mouth and eyes with a joystick and a data glove, while I used a second joystick and a keyboard to operate the hips, legs, arms and a few special effects.

This ended up being a really fun job, but none of us had done digital puppeteering before so there were a lot of challenges on the way there. Sheldon initially wanted to use a motion capture suit to operate Wert. We experimented with a suit in late 2007, but soon discovered that it was too unreliable and unpredictable for a live performance. So with only about a month to go before the gig, we ditched the suit and went with the 2-operator approach we ended up using. As we practised with the character, we discovered more possibilities and I kept tweaking things and adding features until a couple of days before the event. Everything worked well on the night and we had lots of great feedback from the audience.

Here’s a few photos and some screengrabs of Wert: