I love this excerpt from Folded Feather Theatre‘s production Life Still, which has been playing at the Edinburgh Fringe recently.
puppetry
Being John Malkovich via real-time facial recognition
Anyone involved in puppetry in any way knows that the first question you get asked is ‘So, have you seen that movie Being John Malkovich?” Here’s a system where you can control the face of someone else – even John Malcovich – using facial recognition in realtime via a webcam.
Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet
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!)
How to Train Your Dragon Live
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)
Snuff Puppets – Human Body Parts puppets
Snuff Puppets recently entertained crowds at Federation Square in Melbourne with their amazing Human Body Parts puppets.
Ladybird puppet
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.
Willingness to negotiate is a strength
My hunch is that some right wing Republicans in the US calculated a while ago that Obama’s most exploitable weakness was his belief in negotiation and fair compromise. So they set out with the full intention of pushing him to the limit to see what they could get, either in more items on their agenda or in portraying him as weak, or hopefully (in their eyes), both. Willingness to negotiate is often seen as weakness by those that see the world in black and white, and themselves as pragmatists. Instead it is a strength, and an essential skill in conflict resolution. I hope it seriously backfires on them, and sooner rather than later.
And just a note not entirely unrelated: look at this jaw-dropping quote from the Bush years ‘We create our own reality’.
The bravest man amongst them durst not touch her tail
Four-and-twenty tailors went to kill a snail,
The bravest man amongst them durst not touch her tail;
She put out her horns like a little Kyloe cow;
Run, tailors, run, or she’ll kill you all e’en now.
One of my upcoming projects is to build a remote control snail, so I’ve been gathering some information about snails. I’ve always rather liked snails, an attitude that is easy to keep when our ducks keep our garden virtually snail free. I always assumed that snails only ate plant matter, and had no distinguishable mouth on their faces, so to speak. How wrong I was!
Now looking at Snuff Puppets fabulous giant puppet snail, Mirabel, I see the mouth and tongue are quite a feature. At one point in this video it swipes just about all of someone’s fairy floss!
Never say no to Panda!
Funny!
