Talking dog wows the judges on Britain's Got Talent 2015

Ron Czapala

Nothing to do with microcontrollers or electronics but... See post #3 for more details...

GordonMcComb

But it is electronics, somewhere, to activate the mouth in the fake snout.

Miss Wendy doesn't seem too perturbed with wearing it, so I guess she's under no discomfort. At least it's not electric shock, the way they used to do it.

Ron Czapala

GordonMcComb wrote: »

But it is electronics, somewhere, to activate the mouth in the fake snout.

Miss Wendy doesn't seem too perturbed with wearing it, so I guess she's under no discomfort. At least it's not electric shock, the way they used to do it.

I suspected something like that but it looks natural.

Might be something as simple as an air-bladder and squeeze bulb.

EDIT: at 2:39 in the video you can see a cutout area in the base of the dog's pedestal and what looks like a foot pedal or control

I even downloaded the video and captured still images and zoomed in but the resolution is too low to see any detail.

More info here: http://metro.co.uk/2015/04/13/britains-got-talent-2015-animal-charities-express-concern-over-marc-metrals-talking-dog-miss-wendy-5147930/

Over 10m viewers saw the 61-year-old Parisian sail through to the next round on Saturday night’s show, thanks to a little help from his ‘talking dog’ Miss Wendy.
But according to reports the RSPCA have expressed concern over the act, following suggestions that the dog might have been fitted with a mask over her snout to make her look as though she was actually speaking and singing.

While Wendy was wearing a device that fits like a muzzle, we understand she was still able to breathe and move her mouth. The device is fitted shortly before Wendy appears on stage and removed just after.
A Britain’s Got Talent spokesperson responded, telling Metro.co.uk: ‘During the audition process we consulted the RSPCA’s guidelines for the welfare of performing animals and spoke to Marc in detail about his act.

W9GFO

Ron Czapala wrote: »

EDIT: at 2:39 in the video you can see a cutout area in the base of the dog's pedestal and what looks like a foot pedal or control

Yup, every time the mouth moves his left foot is in the same position. Air would be easy, except connecting/disconnecting without anyone noticing.

I would probably choose to make it wireless, and use a muscle (EMG) sensor to activate.

LoopyByteloose

Do you remember Mr. Ed, the talking horse, and Francis, the talking mule?

Not very sophisticated technology. As I recall, the handlers just used peanut butter on the roof of their mouths to make them appear to be talking.

If you study manga animation, there is a relatively small set of mouth motions that visually allude to speech. Facial expressions do much to imply agreement or anger, and much is expressed by the eyes. Lip synching is just a small portion of the visual clues and a lot of imperfection seems tolerable.

GordonMcComb

Well, the whole act is based around the novelty, not the quality of the ventriloquism. He relies on everyone watching the dog, and hoping you'll miss several instances of very obvious lip movement. I mean, watch at 2:59 when the dog "meows." At 3:33 and 3:41 it's not much better. There are times when he doesn't even try.

It's clearly a foot pedal at the base. At 2:44, for example, when the dog says, "Oh yes I want," you can see his leg lift up and down.

The routine is pretty good. He just needs to work on his presentation a bit more.

GordonMcComb

Loopy Byteloose wrote: »

Do you remember Mr. Ed, .... As I recall, the handlers just used peanut butter on the roof of their mouths

Fully debunked (and unworkable anyway for the amount of scenes he was in). The wiki page on the show explains the real story. The mouth movements were on cue.

LoopyByteloose

So Mr. Ed and Francis the mule actually had to perform on cue. Being about 10 years old watching a black and white TV, everyone claimed it was done with peanut butter. I like the urban legend better.

Does Wikipedia always tell the truth?

I do find it all a bit strange that we have a French man with likely a French talking dog on a TV show called, Britian's Got Talent.

The dog seems to not really speak in full sentences, just short utterances. And of course, having a cute shaggy dog hides all the potential contradictions of facial expression. In sum, the performance avoids just about anything complex, and the audience is willing overlook a lot because the dog is cute.

When are they going to realize that these were French performers?

GordonMcComb

The "replies" from the dog aren't lengthy because this is how most ventriloquist acts play. The human is the straight man, and the "dummy" is the jokester with short and pithy replies. There's a practical reason, too: the more the dummy talks, the more likely the audience will see the performer's lips move. I never got the knack for it, but the the art of ventriloquism relies on the misdirection of the audience's attention.

Wikipedia is repeating other texts, including Alan Young's own interviews where he admits the PB story was made up. Same for trainer Les Hilton's interviews over the years. A willing horse can be trained to walk backwards, count with stomps of his feet, twist his ears on cue, and lots of other things. They are extremely intelligent animals. The peanut butter explanation was cute, but how do you get the horse to stop moving its mouth? Wash it out with water every time? If you think about it, any sticky food would have the animal "talking" every moment of the scene!

As for the performers in the clip being French and from Paris, the name of the show is "Britain's Got Talent," not "Britons Got Talent." I mean, if the US disallowed Canadians to be in "American" films, we'd be without Michael J. Fox, William Shatner, Keanu Reeves, John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, and tons of others.

xanadu

In a few days this will probably be on a crowd sourcing site. The "make your dog talk kit" comes with everything you need to make your dog talk. For serious dog lovers only, etc.

The thing in the video is too fast, no dog opens their mouth like that.

Ltech

Same item.
Belgium got talent 2015
This is real, no fake.

https://youtu.be/LSBq1YjHL6w

LoopyByteloose

I do like the Belgium dog better... some real talent there. Dogs do try to vocalize with humans, but they don't have the same larnyx structure.

But I did gain a lot from thinking about the first dog.

The whole performance is an excellent case study in misdirection if you question just how much an audience will accept and why. I strongly suspect that cuteness is a big factor in getting people to lower their expectations. And of course, having an animal perform a human-like task may also make the audience more forgiving. My point is that they are so forgiving that they overlooked that the competitor was not British.

Another side that held my attention was the question of how much of lip synching is merely open and closing of the mouth. With a dog, there isn't much else involved in expression. I have been working with animation for awhile now, and expressing feeling has so much to do with the whole face in a human that it becomes challenging to draw dramatic animated cartoons. But lip-synching in animals that are cute and with bright eyes has long been the standard fare of cartoons since the early days of Mickey Mouse.

In sum, there is a lot of psychological and cultural content that allows for this kind of legerdomain. I don't think that the standard ventriloquist straight man role is the real basis for short utterances. I believe it is actually the need to have the 'dummy' work with short utterances that pretty much standardized the roles. Why create an overly ambitious script that might fail, when a simpler one gets you standing ovations? It is all about what one can get away with, once they have won over the audience's acceptance. This guy really charmed his audience. Any technology involved plays a minimual role in success.

BTW, here are the entrant requirements....
http://www.itv.com/competitions/embed.php?subscriber=UTV&oid=1532&type=tcs&origin_type=tcs&origin_oid=all

Heater.

Loopy,

...they are so forgiving that they overlooked that the competitor was not British.

What is the big deal about that? Everyone knows where he is from, perhaps they don't care?

Anyway, I have always loathed acts like that, French or otherwise

LoopyByteloose

@Heater
No big deal, it is just that the whole affair was entirely a ruse. This act could never hope to qualify for a prize.

BTW, I find ledgerdomain a facinating subject. While many here are trying to find a way to put a Ghost in a Machine, the media is trying to take the Ghost out of the Man. Awareness of how we are fooled is useful for self-protection, and maybe selling something. We might even learn to make robots that are not easily fooled.

CuriousOne

prop, arduino or MSP430?