(Photo: Brisbane Times: Andrew Wight)
According to The Brisbane Times, this giant marionette doll, made by John Cox’s Creature Workshop, was being filmed on the streets of Brisbane for an advertisement for Allen’s Lollies. There is a short video by rockfotze at Flickr, as well as photos by zombietron, shonkathan and rockfotze, and a good close-up of her face.
(Influence of Royal de Luxe?)
(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)
I noticed a flurry of searches on my blog recently for puppets from Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials but only realized that there was a new production by Blind Summit Theatre when I read on Stitches and Glue that Paul Vincett was one of the makers of the new puppets, along with the puppet designer Nick Barnes, and Billy Achilleos.
I’m really excited by the exquisite aesthetic of these puppets. Take a look at the showreel slide show or the album of stills. They suggest the essence of the creatures with the simplest of lines – just beautiful!
Blind Summit Theatre was founded in 1997 by Nick Barnes and Mark Down to make new plays with puppets for adult audiences. His Dark Materials is on at Birmingham Rep: 13th March – 18th April; and then at the West Yorkshire Playhouse : 28th May – 20th June.
There is some great puppet making information on the Blind Summit site, too, though not specifically for this kind of puppet.
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.
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)
(photo via Spike Jonze Fan Blog)
The trailer of the long awaited Spike Jonze adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are has just be released on Apple (interesting choice!). The movie will be in theatres from 16 October 2009. It’s funny how recognizably Australian the forest and beach are in the opening sequence! I can’t tell yet if I’ll love this, but it is looking promising. For me it will probably depend on how much sentimentality has been allowed to creep in: I’m hoping for very little.
Previously:
Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are: Link Dump
The Coldplay puppets from the Life in Technicolour ii video are touring the world rather like those garden gnomes that get abducted and send back postcards from exotic places. They have been down under recently: above you can see them with the Perth city skyline in the background, and last weekend they were sunbaking in Bondi. You can follow them here.
The interview with Dougal Wilson, the video director, gives some information about the making of the puppets. They were designed by Wilson, and the idea was to make them look like Punch and Judy caricatures, rather than close look-alikes for the band members. They were sculpted in clay by Nonny Banks, rendered in fibreglass and painted to look like wood.
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.
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
