I love this interview with Terry the Squirrel from Sammy J And the Forest Of Dreams from a couple of years ago; it’s a riot. The puppeteer is Heath McIvor. McIvor and Sammy J’s new show, Sammy J and Randy in Ricketts Lane, is playing at the Melbourne Comedy Festival from 25 March to 14 April.
puppetry
Handspring’s giraffe
The amazing Handspring Puppet Company‘s giraffe at Design Indaba 2010 in Cape Town recently.
Cloudbuilder’s 3D iPhone puppets
Kara Jansson Kovacev (Cloudbuilder) creates intriguing and creepy 3D iPhone puppet images on an iPhone 3gs using the Sculptmaster 3D and Brushes and/or Layers apps. She also makes puppets and toy theatre.
On my first attempts using Sculptmaster 3D I found controlling the results difficult, and my images very blobby. But perhaps the lumpiness is intrinsic to the app, and part of the spookiness of Kovacev’s images comes from the juxtaposition of that lumpiness with the definition added with the other apps.
Sand and other fluid animation
Kseniya Simonova created a sensation in last year’s Ukraine’s Got Talent with her sand animations. I think my mum will like this one.
In terms of creating story through such fluid re-drawing and re-framing, I draw connections to Terra Prenyada (The Pregnant Earth) by the master puppeteer and Spanish artist, Joan Baixas, and to the wonderful work of William Kentridge. MoMA’s present Kentridge exhibition website offers much to explore.
Awesome 3d papercraft portrait
Eric Testroete, a 3d artist in Vancouver, made this awesome papercraft self-portrait head mask for Halloween last year. If you scroll along at his site you can see the making process. Wouldn’t it be cool to use heads like this in theatre?
Hand shadow wallpaper design
I rather like these wallpaper designs from Paper Boy Wallpaper. The hand shadow puppet one comes in inverse colouring, too.
Two puppet-related iPhone apps
Small Wonders’ Battle of Puppets is described in a detailed review in the Your Local Guardian as ‘a quirky, inventive, beautifully styled and thoroughly likeable castle defence game’. Likewise, most reviews I have seen have been favourable. It’s certainly a cute idea to frame the game as a puppet show. I quickly lost interest in the game itself, though lets face it, I’m not particularly adept or interested in that kind of game.
I think I might have more fun with Elmo’s Monster Maker:
Erth’s magnificent tiger puppet
(Photo credit: anthonyung. Thanks for the CC licence. Click to enlarge)
This magnificent tiger puppet was one of the highlights of the recent Chinese New Year Twilight Parade celebrations in Sydney. Videos at the ABC, and on YouTube show it in action, and e_yew at Flickr has a close-up of the tiger’s head.
According to Street Corner:
The 3.5 metre tall City of Sydney float is operated by nine puppeteers and has an audio system in its belly to make it roar and purr.
Constructed from found and recycled materials, the float celebrates the Year of the Metal Tiger and is a symbol of City of Sydney’s commitment to sustainability.
The Metal Tiger was built by renowned prop maker Erth and its parts include vacuum cleaners, take-away food containers, aluminium cans, bicycle parts, grid iron and hockey guards, pool noodles, old speaker boxes, kitchenware, hub caps and motorbike components.
The float will be adorned with 100m of LED bud lighting, 90 metres of rope light, and tips the scales at approximately 300kg.
Australian puppetry links and news
Towards the end of last year I added an Australian puppetry links page here. It’s listed above with the other site navigation tabs. It is a little more than links because there are brief notes with some of the entries. I also started up @OzPuppetry, a Twitter account for Australian puppetry news, which you can see running real-time updates in the widget in the sidebar to the left.
What prompted me to do both was the frustration I felt when I received an out-of-the-blue email asking my thoughts on the ‘puppetry industry, or lack thereof’, in Australia. Although in many ways I’m only on the periphery of the industry, I was aware of lots of exciting and diverse puppetry at the time, as I tried to convey (pdf). So I decided to write down publicly what I did know as links, and to track news as I saw it on Twitter.
But I should say straight up that I don’t know how long I’ll keep doing either. At the moment I’m enjoying it, but I don’t intend to tie myself to it if my interest wanes. Also, with many of the puppetry community here taking to FaceBook for notifications and networking, perhaps it is only a matter of time before it becomes redundant?
