Frequently Asked Questions and Tips

(For puppet-specific questions and tips, see the individual product pages: Gordo, Yorick, and Mirror.)

Tips

Use the puppets interactively

While the puppets allow you to record performances, a live performance by a puppeteer, which interacts directly with your visitors, is going to be far more memorable and engaging than a canned animation. When kids realize that the creature is talking directly to them, that's when the magic kicks in, so if you can spare someone in your haunt to act as a puppeteer, do so.

Get the right puppeteer

The charm of these puppets is heavily influenced by the charm of your puppeteer. Find the right person to drive your puppets and it will be a success. Get someone who is good with your target age group, particularly if you expect young kids.

It's also important to get someone with a voice that matches the puppet. Don't use one of those voice-changers that you can buy around Halloween; they typically distort your voice so much that your visitors can't tell what you are saying. Just practice and rely on good voice acting if you can; it's more believable, and it's more understandable.

Don't use the microphone feature

Almost everyone wants to use the microphone feature, because they think it will be easy. This will not get you the best results.

The microphone reacts only to the input volume. It cannot distinguish sounds which are made with your mouth closed ("mmmm"), cannot distinguish sounds made by your puppeteer and sounds made by your visitors or other nearby sound effects, and cannot react with the same fidelity that a human can.

Furthermore, it locks your puppeteer into a given sound volume. Whispers will not move the mouth, and shouting will just peg the mouth open. And as your puppeteer gets tired over the evening, or the ambient noise rises as you get more visitors, the microphone calibration can get out of whack from the level of sound you intend.

A much better approach is to just control the mouth manually. It doesn't take long to get proficient with the practice, and your results will be much more believable and smooth.

"So why do you even have that feature?" you ask. First, lots and lots of people asked for it. Second, it's useful when you can tightly control the sound input (such as if you are using some other sound source piped into your computer's in-jack from a prop or something).

Build a Facade

We strongly recommend you don't just stick a computer monitor out on a table. That doesn't yield any magic at all.

If you have the time and capability, build something to hide the computer monitor. This can be as simple as a painted cardboard box or as complex as a frontage for your house.

One cool trick is to hide the computer monitor with a "scrim," which is a piece of black fabric which is opaque when light is pointing towards it, but is transparent when light is coming from behind it. If you place a digital puppet's screen up against a scrim, you get a field of black where the puppet "hovers" in place. (Trust us, it looks really cool.) To find the right fabric, just take a flashlight, or better yet something with a lit screen like a video iPod, to the fabric store and just hold it behind different weights of black fabric until you find one that works well.

For more suggestions on facade building, see the other effects pages.

IMPORTANT: Be safe when you build a facade. Don't cover up air vents on the monitor or your computer, make sure it is supervised at all times, and use common sense when building your facade. You want your horrors to be fun, not real.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I make the digital puppets as big as possible onscreen?

Our digital puppets run at 800x600 (or, for Mirror, 640x480). You should set your screen resolution to be as close to that as possible without going smaller. This is usually done in your computer's system preferences.

Also, the puppets which are taller than they are wide have the option to switch between Portrait and Landscape modes. By displaying the puppet sideways, you can turn your monitor on its side for a larger display. (If you do this, make sure you aren't blocking heat vents!)

Also, if you have a larger television than computer monitor, you might want to look into adapter cables which will let you display your computer's video output on the larger television screen. Similarly, an LCD projector can display your puppet very large.

Help! I can't record a performance - it stops recording as soon as I start!

Our puppets which allow you to record a performance tie your performance to a sound file. If you don't provide them with a sound file to record your performance against, you will stop recording as soon as you start. Make sure you give it a standard audio file format, like .mp3 or .wav, that your file really is in that format (and not just named .mp3), that your file's permissions are set so that Gordo can read it, and that you have given Gordo the proper location of the file. If you don't hear your sound file playing when you start recording, then something is preventing Gordo from accessing your sound file.

Can I save a performance as a QuickTime movie?

Our puppets do not provide this feature. However, you should be able to use Snapz Pro X on Mac or a similar utility on Windows to capture the screen video for later use in a video editing application.

I'm using Windows, and I get script error messages.

This is probably due to the way you extracted the ZIP file. In order to run properly, there needs to be a folder called "Xtras" in the same location as the Gordo application. The asFFT.x32 file needs to be in the Xtras folder. If the asFFT.x32 file is not in the Xtras folder, or the Xtras folder is not in the same folder as the application, or if permissions are set so that Gordo cannot read out of the Xtras folder, then Gordo will fail to run.