Field Guide to New Media for the Performing Arts

Live Movies : A Field Guide to New Media for the Performing Arts (PDF, 12Mb. 2006) is a free 252-page ebook of theory, history, and case-studies. It should be quite useful for any university students writing essays about the blending of staged performance and interactive new media. Innovative stage-design and event-design is, of course, another area of creative production in which iClone users could deploy their talents.

Originally given away free (it was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts), the website for the book has since completely vanished from the web. It’s also not listed on Amazon U.S. or U.K. So I have to assume it’s “abandonware”, and that I can link to it at what appears to be the book’s last remaining location. If you’re interested, then grab it while you can.

Copying text from the PDF is disabled, but if students need to quote from the book in an essay then just use Microsoft OneNote thus…

Open OneNote, then: “Insert” / “Screen Clipping” / capture your paragraph as an image / then right click on the auto-inserted image, and click on “Copy Text from Picture”. The text is captured, made editable, and sent to your Windows clipboard.

If you’re interested in this book you may also be interested in Animata, free open-source software for real-time theatre animation. Judging by the videos, it’s “real-time motion capture and transfer, without the dots” (using eyesweb and Proce55ing)…

Reverse Shadow Theatre from gabor papp on Vimeo.

Those interested in the technical details behind using this sort of software for controlling shadow-play puppets might be interested in this technical paper (PDF link).