The UK contemporary puppetry company Folded Feather recently built two large spectacular puppets out of car parts for Hyundai’s New Thinkers Index, a campaign ‘about new thinking and new possibilities’.

Previously: Folded Feather’s chickens

This fantastic air-powered 16 foot tall spider puppet is made by Tim Davies. Wired.co.uk has more technical details about the structure and how it operates. (I think this information must come from the artist’s site, but it is down at the moment).

(photo credit: David Gilford/complexify @ Flickr - thanks for the CC license)

This beautiful sculpture of the notorious albino sperm whale, Mocha Dick is by the artist Tristin Lowe, made in collaboration with the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. It’s huge! – 52 feet long and 10 feet tall – and made of industrial wool pieced over an inflatable vinyl understructure. The gallery at the Virginia Musuem of Fine Arts shows some other great images including a close-up the barnacles.

A beautiful animation for the World Wildlife Fund and the Australian environment.

This is the fabulous Phoebe Sparkles, a giant aerial puppet made for the show Highly Strung, which was performed from the silos at Natimuk over the weekend at the Nati Frinj (Natimuk Fringe Festival). I’ve been enjoying Dave Jones‘s blogging of the build over the last couple of months, so it’s great to see the puppet come to life.  The daytime rehearsal photos give better perspective on her size and the task of  puppeteering her. Phoebe was named by the kids at the local school, and the plan was to project talking animations drawn by the kids onto her face. I wonder if that was possible in the very windy conditions on the night.

The silos have been used for aerial dance and puppetry before.

Dave also makes lovely puppets from wire and other rusty farm-type bits and pieces of metal. These and the amazing bird below are characters in a long term work-in-progress stop motion film of his, The Rhyme of the Ancient Merino.

The Birds (Rhyme of the Ancient Merino Work in Progress) from dave jones on Vimeo.

This is a giant remote control snail that I recently made for The Fool Factory for their promotion of National Science Week 2011. It’s about a metre long, fitted onto the chassis of a remote control car, and has eyes that move from side to side. It’s made to look somewhat like Australia’s largest land snail, the Giant Panda Snail, which inhabits sub-tropical forests in Queensland.

I’ve posted photos of the making process. The shell is shaped polystyrene layered with  paper mache, and then painted. The body is made from thin PE foam sheeting covered by a strange irregular and stretchy netted fabric which I used for the skin texture, then painted. Inside the snail there is a cage that separates and protects the body from remote control chassis, and a small aluminium structure that holds the servo motors that rotate the eyes.

I’m also like the following picture of the snail in my studio, although it reminds me of when we first moved into our house and there was a small crack by the back door where leopard slugs used to come in during the night to eat the cat food in the laundry! Worse was when they used venture further into the house and we could accidentally tread on them barefoot if we were up in the night tending babies – eew!

The newly released Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet video game has a shadow puppet aesthetic and beautifully realised alien creatures and environments. Gaming Irresponsibly’s video review and the first 15 minutes of gameplay gives a longer introduction to the fluid, multi-layered, highly detailed imagery and the gorgeous mix of organic and industrial.

Developed by Michael Gange (who previously created Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets) and Joe Olson, it is described as ’a side-scrolling adventure that is a fusion of art, classical animation, and captivating gameplay’ and is developed by Shadow Planet Productions (Fuelcell Games and Gagne International).

(Hope it comes to iPad someday!)

Melbourne’s Creature Technology Company, which had worldwide success with their live arena show Walking with Dinosaurs Live, have just launched their new venture How to Train Your Dragon Live at a Dreamworks and Global Creatures media event showing off an awesome 4 metre tall fire-breathing animatronic dragon, the Deadly Nadder. Apparently it’s one of 24 dragons!

I’m happy to see that this new production has an emphasis on story and emotional engagement in addition to the sheer spectacle, since my one reservation about Walking with Dinosaurs Live was the lack of emotional content.

This video from The Age has some footage of the making process, as does this one:

Some additional links:

The Creature Technology Company’s videos at their website
Daily Telegraph: gallery of 15 images
The Age: Here be Dragons
The Australian: Monster epic producer’s dragons fly high
774 ABC Melbourne: How to Train your Dragon hits Melbourne: radio interview with Dreamworks’ Tim Johnson, who co-produced the movie and directs the new exhibition.
Sky News: Melbourne to host Dragon arena show

(via Philip Millar, Kari Klein and PuppetVision)

This is a ladybird glove puppet I recently made for the Riverstone Family Centre’s early literacy program.  She has a little leather library bag over her shoulder in which she is carrying a little book!

There are some more photos of her in my photoset at Flickr, and a short video o f her.

These are our three beautiful new Indian Runner ducks! We got them yesterday afternoon, and this morning there was a present for us – an egg! The white duck at the back and the drake (a trout colouring) are just 8 months old, and the cinnamon one with the flash on her wing is perhaps a year older.