This card is a 'still' taken from a VRML animation. It depicts a jig 'Lumps of Plum Pudding'. The men are dressed very approximately in Wadard Morris Men kit. There are no bells or handkerchiefs and Wadard men do not wear hats. Indeed, a dancer who does normally wear a hat, takes it off for a jig and places it on the ground between himself and the musician.

Click on the picture to run the animation. There will be few seconds delay before it begins.

The animation includes sound, originally a synthesised midi file. However, the current presentation requires a browser supporting HTML5, which does not accept the MIDI format and I have had to convert to MP3. There is now a slight loss in synchronisation.

The animation was originally produced on a 450 MHz PC with a Matrox 200 graphics accelerator card, an SB16 sound card, supporting general MIDI, and Cortona 2.2 as the VRML browser. With that system the movement was somewhat jerky. Current systems have a faster frame-rate and much smoother motion.

Both figures in this model, are based on (although not conformant with) the Humanoid Animation Group's "Specification for a Standard Humanoid", is capable of individual movement, although in this performance only the dancer is animated.

Appologies to those of you who know the dance, or at least, the genre. The most difficult part of this animation has been the analysis of the dance itself, down to what the dancer should be doing on each beat or half beat. All I have succeeded in doing is to get a very rough approximation. Currently, when run at a sufficiently high frame-rate (~17 fps) to give fairly smooth animation, the dance is too languid and the jumps too shallow or non-existent. A lot more tweaking will be needed to get it right, if I still have the enthusiasm.

For some detail about how this animation was produced click here.