puppetry

What’s in your Suitcase?

Posted by hil

If you are in Melbourne, the shadow puppetry featured in tonight’s Melbourne Australia Day Concert 2012, What’s in your Suitcase?‘ should be a treat. Gary Friedman is the puppetry producer and puppeteer, accompanied by a number of supporting puppeteers, and Conor Fox the puppetry director. Gary also designed the 60 square metre suitcase set that doubles as a shadow screen. I hope we get to see video footage of the puppetry sequences later.

I’m happy to see a strong representation of the multicultural stories and identity that make up Australia today.

The concert starts at 7pm at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, and the program and full credits are available in the concert handout.

Update 2015: here’s the video!

A carved wooden marionette

Posted by hil

Towards the end of last year I was commissioned to make a marionette which was to look like, and be a Christmas present for, my clients’ son. They provided a few photos, and seemed pretty happy with the likeness when they picked it up.

For various reasons I was swayed to try carving a wooden puppet. It seemed a good learning challenge, and  I’d recently been inspired by Kay Yasugi’s marionette carving workshop in Prague.  How cool would it be to do a workshop like that! And there were practical reasons, too;  in particular, short hair and a short beard is hard to represent well, and I thought the stippling of the wood would be a good and minimalist way of doing it, which proved right.

I was delighted to find that Puppets in Prague not only runs workshops, but has really detailed puppet making tutorials online – a wonderful resource!  I used  jelutong timber, a good substitute for the recommended  but hard-to-get Linden or English Lime. I found the exacting woodwork for the body difficult, especially without a band saw, and I didn’t get things lined up perfectly. But I really enjoyed the carving! Puppets in Prague offer ready-made components in their online shop and another time I think it could be worth my time to buy those and concentrate on the carving.

The online tutorials didn’t detail exactly how the puppets were stringed to the controller. Kay at Pupperoos very kindly set me straight and sent me photos of how her puppet was stringed. Many thanks, Kay!

There are some making photos in my Flickr photoset.

4th National Australian Puppetry & Animatronics Summit

Posted by hil

If you have a paper, workshop, or performance that you would like to present at the 4th National Puppetry and Animatronics Summit in Australia, please submit your proposal to the Summit Steering Committee by 31 January 2012.

The summit will be held in Melbourne, 5 – 8 July, 2012, and hosted by the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

Building on the best experiences of the previous Summits, the 4th Summit will provide a stimulating and provocative program of workshops, masterclasses, and forums for policy discussions and debates that celebrate the arts of puppetry and animatronics.

An exciting new feature of the 4th Summit is a ten day performance project masterclass lead by an international guest artist which culminates in a presentation at the opening of the Summit. There will also be a film program and a Summit Club where puppeteers can perform experimental items and works-in-progress.

I’ve been to the previous summits in Melbourne 2002, Hobart 2006, and Perth 2008 and found them very worthwhile, so it’s good to know there is another one coming up.

Tarrengower Puppetfest

Posted by hil

The inaugural Tarrengower  Puppetfest is coming up quickly! It takes place in the central Victorian town of Maldon on 10 -12 March 2012. The relaxed rural setting, where people can easily walk between performance venues, cafe’s and eating places, should be a drawcard as it was at the One Van Puppet Festival, which used to be held in Blackheath in the Blue Mountains.

The artistic director, Richard Hart from Dream Puppets, has put together a great program, and there are more performances yet to be included, including a puppet slam. Dream Puppets also puts together the Oz Puppetry Email Newsletter which is a good way of keeping up to to date with Australian puppetry news, and the festival.

A little hand

Posted by hil

I’ve just started making a marionette. I like how this little hand is shaping up.

Phoebe Sparkles, a giant aerial puppet at Natimuk

Posted by hil

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.

Puppet Heap’s new hand puppets

Posted by hil

Puppet Heap have recently released a series of cool hand puppets that are available individually  through Amazon. I really like their stylised caricature design and aesthetic, a breath of fresh air amid the plush and felt. I also like this devil which will be in their next upcoming series:

Giant remote control snail

Posted by hil

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!

Some thoughts on 3D printing and the arts

Posted by hil

If you want to blow your mind, take a journey into the revolutionary realm of 3D printing. Rapid prototyping has been around for about 20 years, but 3D printing seems now to be quickly becoming a viable manufacturing process for a wide range of materials and objects. There are lots of examples, of which the following are only a small selection:

Like other disruptive technology, 3D printing looks as if it will follow the path of offering the ability to decentralize and customise, and to make unique things cost effectively.

It’s interesting to consider what impact this is already having and going to have on artists and how they make things, as it becomes mainstream. Imagine, we can digitally sculpt or scan something in 3D (or photograph it, send the photos to somewhere like Photofly to get them stitched into a 3D scan), then send the files to a fabricator or perhaps even our own 3D printer , and there it is. There is the obvious debate between new and old, manufactured and handmade, and whether quality will be enhanced or compromised.  Most likely 3D printing will become an additional useful tool for some processes, components and items, and competency in these technologies will become more expected in the arts industry.  And, entirely handmade is likely to become rarer but more valuable.