Plywood, MDF, nylon cord, various hardware, custom designed interface circuit, various electronics.

In the fall 2005 semester, the Cranbrook Design Department held a two week charrette to produce a video project for display at the Teach Me: Stories conference in Venice, Italy.

Our department selected five prominent theme from the various tellings "Frankenstein". We divided into small groups to create a short video for each theme, which were then collected into a video exquisite corpse.

Kelli Miller, Jonathan Keller (c71123), and I worked together on the final of the five themes, death. For our segment we used a combination of live performance, and realtime video.

The Electronic Marionette Interface was designed to control a digitally projected character (our imagining of frankenstein's monster) that engaged in a dialog with Jonathan, who stood on stage in front of the screen. The interface captures the manipulation of two sticks, each with two strings attached. This information can be sent to a computer via USB. In this application, these directly controlled the position of the on screen characters hands. Additionally, the interface monitors two foot pedals which are used to trigger scripted events, such as displaying subtitles of the monsters speech, and changing the monsters head.

The interface is fully self contained and collapses into a suitcase that can be checked for air travel. (Yes, the box does inspire a thorough security check.)