Original concept & background graphics: Päivi Hintsanen
Programming and interaction design: Matti Niinimäki
Full credits and other information (in Finnish)

Photo by: Sirja Moberg

The idea of the workshop/installation was that anyone could participate in the workshop by walking in, drawing their own character and then animating that character just by moving their own body.

This video shot by YLE for Keski-Suomen uutiset illustrates the process. (In Finnish)

The dances were streamed live to the internet. The first video (the last dance we did) has all of the characters on screen at the same time.

You can also browse all the videos over at the bambuser channel http://bambuser.com/channel/animoituliik. Unfortunately due to some technical problems, some of the dances were not recorded. Another issue is the sound. On some of the videos the sound is clipping very badly and on some of them there is no sound at all.

Almost 90 people came and drew their characters, 94 dances were recorded online and probably double that amount came just to see what was going on during the three days this project was running.

The movements of the participants were tracked by a custom built solution based on tBeta and Quartz Composer. The participants wore infrared “beacons” on their ankles and wrists that were being tracked by an infrared camera. The information was then sent over to Animata to animate the characters.

The infrared light can be seen weakly in normal photos as well:

Photo by: Sirja Moberg

Here are some photos from the workshop and behind the scenes. The first photos are from a little workshop that I taught covering the basics of Animata for some of our assistants.

A HUGE THANK YOU to Live Herring and all of the other people who made this possible.

• Animoitu liike website
• Review of the workshop at liikekieli.com (in Finnish)

Here is the basic outline:

Part 1: Basics of Animata
Introduction to creating real-time animations in Animata. How to use the interface. How to set up different characters and scenes from still images. Creating meshes, joints and skeletons. Simple animations inside Animata.

Part 2: External control of Animata with OSC
The real power of Animata is in the way that it can be controlled with external applications using OSC messages. Examples will be shown on how to use MIDI controllers, sound input and Arduino to control real-time animations. Software examples at least in Max/MSP and Quartz Composer. Examples on how to set up a scene for a live visualist gig.

Register for this and the other workshops at the AVIT-Kezmarok website. http://kezmarok.avit.info/