Yes, I know now that this has been all over the web, but I only saw it today: Tubbypaws’s papercraft Ceiling Cat.
fun
The Nano Song: puppets explain nanotechnology!
This cute Sesame Street style video won both the Critics’ Choice and People’s Choice awards in the ACS Nanotation NanoTube ‘What is Nano?’ competition for a video tutorial about nanotechnology. It was a ‘collaborative effort by a group of researchers from University of California, Berkeley including Patrick Bennett, David Carlton, Molly Felz, Nola Klemfuss, Glory Liu (singer), Ryan Miyakawa, Stacey Wallace, and Angelica Zen’.
Yay! a Fail Whale card!
I’m really happy – Yiying Lu sent me one of her cool Fail Whale cards! Here it is with my little sculpture. Thanks so much Yiying :)
Experimenting on hot cross buns
The Laucke flour mills site suggests the best place for proofing and rising dough is in an esky with some boiled water and the lid on, so that’s what I’m trying with my annual batch of hot cross buns. It will be a revelation if it works!
Update: They turned out so well – the best batch I’ve ever made, by far, and I’m sure it was because of the esky trick. The buns expanded quickly in a fluffy kind of way – they have never done that before, and have always previously taken such an age to rise. Might tempt me to try making bread again sometime.
Giant wire marionette in Vancouver
(photo credit: stephenccwu)
This huge wire marionette appeared at the opening of the new Vancouver Convention Centre last weekend; I gather it was associated with Cirque du Soleil. It was a performance by the Underground Circus, and the marionette was made by Peter Boulanger (who was kind enough to let me know in a comment below). It’s made of aluminium (I guess it’s really thick round wire?) , and at about 40 feet, billed as the tallest marionette in Northern America. The puppet moves to music and is operated by 5 puppeteers working pulleys. In this photo you can see it standing fully, supporting two acrobats: the one in the ball and one on the length of material. This is a great photo of it, too.
(influence of Royal de Luxe? Peter says not directly, though he knew of their work)
Shadow monsters
Shadow Monsters by Philip Worthington is a wonderful interactive and digital form of shadow puppets, in which the programming generates fantastic and playful extensions to the shadows of participants bodies and hands, and quirky and wild sounds. (There are more YouTube videos).
The Shadow Monsters grew from a brief about technological magic tricks. I was looking at optical illusions and Victorian hand shadows particularly interested me as a starting point. The subtlety with which a character could be created was already very magical and I wondered if there was room to experiment with these techniques. Looking back to my own childhood, I remembered the feeling of casting huge shapes in the light of my father’s slide projector, creating monsters and silly animals. I enjoy working with simple intuitive things; playful feelings that touch us on a very basic level.At the same time I was experimenting with some software for vision recognition so slowly the monsters evolved. At first I made a puppet show with coloured pencils that had hair and eyes… and this slowly grew in complexity until I had a system that could go some of the way to understanding hand posture. The rest is history.
The Lost Tribes of NYC
For those of us with a love of pareidolia, a cool short film called The Lost Tribes of New York City by London Squared Productions.
(via Laughing Squid)
Summer Knits High / We Can Knit Heroes
If you are a Chris Lilley fan – and I know that’s not everyone – check out vagueknitting‘s photoset Summer Knits High / We Can Knit Heroes with the byline: Cute finger puppet idea becomes preposterously overgrown Chris Lilley fangirl project. I specially like Jonah Takalua, but then I had a soft spot for him in the series, too.
The Promise
Remember the little elephant and boy puppets I was working on last year? Here are some pictures of how they turned out. They were for the Flying Fruitfly Circus production The Promise, which premiered at the Sydney Festival about a month ago. The build for the show was quite big, and largely undertaken by Tim Denton and Annie Forbes in Melbourne, but I was asked to make these little ones and a life-size elephant trunk (more of the trunk soon in another post). The designer was Richard Jeziorny, whom I really like working with.
It’s part of the business that directors sometimes need to alter significantly or completely cut scenes and props, and in this case the elephant was altered or remade in Melbourne so that it could have more head movement than the original design. I was given the opportunity to do it, but couldn’t take it on at the time. It looks from this picture as if it was covered and the head possibly remade completely.
The production received great reviews such as this at the Australian Stage Online. I’d like to see it one day if they tour up this way.
Previously:
A little heffalump
Playing
Studio pics
Nearly done
