Exercise - Building a Tiny Narrative

For this group exercise, we will explore how to create and record a very short scene using the robots.

The objective is to investigate how movement and pose can be used to tell a very simple story. The goal is to create a 15 second tabletop scene which can be videorecorded.

A good starting point is to hand-puppet the robots while developing the idea, following directly from the ideas in Exercise - Interacting Like Robots. After that students can write a program in Snap! to perform the scene autonomously or to enable remote puppeting (teleoperated acting).

Beginning to End

Every story has a beginning and an end. For a single tiny scene, pick a single idea which can be conveyed from start to finish. These will be brief life moments, like these examples:

  1. Two characters pass each other in public while ignoring each other.
  2. One character recognizes another and feels surprised.
  3. A group of characters begin happily dancing.

Following are some prompts to help choose characters, relationship, and action.

  1. Who or what does your robot represent? It is based on a real or fictional idea, person, or robot?
  2. How does your character feel about the other characters? What does your character know or not know?
  3. Actions are Revealing. A good principle to remember is that we cannot see emotions, but we do see the actions they prompt. Can you play out the emotions of the character and find the actions which naturally follow?
  4. What’s the shortest and simplest sequence which has a beginning and an end?
  5. At this stage, the physical action is most important. Dialogue without action is a radio play, not a visual drama. It will be easier to add dialogue once we develop techniques for physical staging.

Improvisation and Rehearsal

A story this short can be developed directly through improvisation. Please follow the “Yes, and ...” approach to exploring different approaches.

Once agreement is reached on the basic scene, practice it again and again until you can confidently play it out for the camera. There will only be time for one or two takes on the camera.

Garth Zeglin, Personal Robotics Lab, Carnegie Mellon University