FantiSea: Giant sea creatures in Esperance

Posted by hil

Haylis_logo (Cool festival image by Haylie Michelle)

Over in Western Australia, designer and maker Bryan Woltjen and animateur Karen Hethey have been engaged for the last few months on the huge task of designing and building 8 giant puppet sea creatures for FantiSea, which will be held on 22 March as part of the Esperance Festival of the Wind. The festival was at first an art-themed celebration of the positive energy wind brings to the town, and has now evolved into a celebration of ‘community, art, culture and shared fun’.

The building of the giant marine puppets is one of those great projects in which the participation of number of community groups, schools and individuals is integral. The festival’s Workshop Gallery has photos that were taken during the first phase of the build at the end of last year, when the ‘unskinned‘ puppets were built, and some of them were used in the inaugural Christmas pageant in Esperance. You can see how the frameworks are made from a mixture of bamboo and cane, with wire and gaffa joins. I love this picture of the unskinned eel! I would really like to be involved with making puppets of this sort sometime…

More recently during the second phase, the puppets have been skinned with muslin, dipped in diluted PVA, and dyed. Also, Karen Hethy is now teaching performers how to animate the giant puppets and doing stage rehearsals in conjunction with local scriptwriter, Derek Clarke.

Lurk, the shark:

day 07 lurk first fitup

Lighting up Ziggy, the leafy sea dragon:

3 ziggy lighting install-1

The gorgeous Dame Agatha, octopus:

6 dame agatha the painted lady

The crab (love this one!):

day 05 bruce & bryan in sailboat

The workshop shed full of finished puppets:

8 to this (wk 6 day 5)

You can click the photos to see them enlarged, and there are more photos here. I think they are wonderful! Thanks, Bryan, for sending me the photos and telling about it all, and I hope to be adding more photos of the actual event.

Update: Photos from the event have now been added.

Mammatus clouds

Posted by hil

Mammatus clouds over Canberra

We have had some amazing clouds over Canberra recently. These mammatus clouds rolled over our place last Saturday evening at sunset.

Now don’t you worry about that

Posted by hil

Now don't you worry about that

An action shot of Joh Bjelke-Peterson welcoming guests to the launch of the Campaign – Federal Elections exhibition at Old Parliament House yesterday! Here is a slightly clearer one of him with Malcolm Fraser. Old Parliament House had a collection of the photographic masks of politicians, but I was asked to make the cartoon Joh last week.

The exhibition itself consists of photos by Andrew Chapman; you can see some of them here. They are wonderful ‘fly on the wall’ glimpses of electioneering politicians and political events from the Fraser years onwards. I was most amused by the ones of Beazley, because he so often looked like a jovial dag, but others were arresting.

Now a giant boy marionette

Posted by hil

Today I came across this photo of a giant boy marionette, taken in Sydney’s CBD in late January. It’s very much like Royal de Luxe’s little giantess (who has been visiting Santiago, Chile, in the company of a rhinoceros) but I doubt he is theirs. Does anyone know the film company, or what production they were working on?

Update: A couple of people have uploaded videos of the puppet. Apparently it is to be in a Korean clothing commercial of some sort:

Marionette
Giant Puppet in Syndey

I assume this was a practice session, since the articulation has a way to go, but it’s interesting to see how tricky it is after the seemingly faultless performances by Royal de Luxe. The hips look a bit too wobbly as if they might need to go back to the drawing board, but the untidy looseness in the legs and arms lend a bit of boyishness at times. I wonder what it is made out of? I’d guess plastic not wood. I was really surprised that Royal de Luxe uses wood.

The rally for David Hicks

Posted by hil

Bring David Hicks Home rally

Last Tuesday I went to the David Hicks rally at Parliament House. I don’t much like going to protests, but sometimes you just have to? I wasn’t sure whether to take my vigil puppet, because although I knew he would attract attention, I didn’t want to imply that I thought it was a okay to wish that fate on the prime minister, much as I despise his politics. The point to me is that no-one should be treated in the way that David Hicks has been. I thought about this aspect when putting up the vigil blog, too, but I hope the understanding is that it’s a request to imagine this happening to anyone.

In the end I took the puppet and hooded him, so he was anonymous, and when I saw the cage protest I was glad I had. It made me a bit uncomfortable for just that reason, as did the the various calls to send various ministers to Guantanamo Bay. Having Ned Kelly as the jailer was a strange choice that I didn’t understand. It just seemed bizarre! Ampersand Duck has the best photo of him!

But overall it was a good, if small, rally. Natasha Stott-Despoja gave a fiery speech, and Andrew Bartlett and Kate Lundy were also good. Mamdouh Habib was the most impassioned, with reason. Loadedog, whom I met for the first time there, gives a good rundown on what Habib said, and I agree with him that what Habib says carries weight because he alone has been there and experienced it. The rally organizers messed up by not announcing ahead of time that he would be speaking, and it was amazing to see how all the reporters and photographers who has wandered off came running back to record what he had to say.

I wandered off myself after Habib’s talk. I find my tolerance for the inevitable speakers who want to jump on the bandwagon is close to zero these days.

On the way to the rally I had noticed a cool painted car, and, while I was parking close by, it had dawned on me that it was Ampersand Duck‘s car! I’ve been enjoying her blog for quite a while now. So I scrabbled around to find a scrap of paper and left a scrawled hello under her windscreen wiper. As I was leaving, she was getting into her car, so I jumped out and had the pleasure of meeting her. It seemed to make the whole day a lot more worthwhile!

Here are my photos from the day at Flickr.