
Stop motion animator Dillon Markey has converted the long-forgotten 1980s Power Glove Nintendo controller into an essential—and aesthetically splendid—tool for animating in stop motion. He explains what he did in this documentary by Ava Benjamin called Playing with Power:
The re-engineered Bluetooth-enabled glove isn’t just for show; Markey has used it to animate on the TV series Robot Chicken as well as on PES shorts like Submarine Sandwich.
The inspiration for a wearable controller came to Markey a few years ago when he was working on a particularly large stop motion stage. “I needed to move from one side of the stage to the other side of the stage, and then back to animate the camera,” he recalled. “And I remembering carrying this USB-attached numeric keypad all around the stage with me, and I was like, ‘Why don’t I just have this on my arm?'”