With a history of two thousand years, Chinese Shadow Play is a splendid art, combined with delicate hand craftsmanship and folk drama. Leather silhouette, including puppets and scenes, are manually carved and painted by folk craftsmen. Each puppet is made of several parts and linked by joints. In a shadow play, a white curtain is hung in the front. The light from several spotlights goes through the semitransparent leather-made objects and projects them onto the screen. Audience on the other side watch the performance of these colored shadows of puppets, which are manipulated by performers. For a fighting scene, the action of the puppets can be very dramatic, sometimes supplemented with special lighting effect. Performance is also accompanied by vocal and musical performance.

The objective of our project is to turn traditional shadow shows into electronic forms such that they become more accessible and be preserved. Computer models of the puppets are created in a semiautomatic process. To correctly capture the gleaming shadowing effect, a rendering technique based on the photon mapping method has been developed. Our initial effort has resulted in an animation that is composed of excerpts of a famous Chinese folk story. In the animation, lighting effects and delicate motions close to a real show are featured. We will present this project at the Sketches & Applications of SIGGRAPH 2003.

Click the image to download a short version of the animation (60MB).

This project is a collaboration between researchers at the Fudan University in China and the University of California at Davis. Participants include:

Yi-Bo Zhu     Chen-Jia Li     I-Fan Shen
Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Aleksander Stompel     Kwan-Liu Ma
University of California at Davis

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