I’m intrigued by this footage of the dragon Toothless taking flight for the first time at Melbourne’s Creature Technology Company! Toothless stars in DreamWorks and Global Creatures’ new arena spectacular How to Train Your Dragon Live which premieres in Melbourne on 2 March, then tours Sydney, Brisbane, and Aukland. Check out their new TV commercial, various other videos and their FaceBook page .
Previously: How to Train Your Dragon Live
I was amazed when I first learnt about Lotte Reiniger a few years ago and saw this video of how she made her stop motion shadow puppetry films. The intricacy and deftness with which she plans, cuts and arranges the silhouettes, and the matter-of-factness in how she describes the process is quite breathtaking.
The Icelandic band Amiina play beautiful new musical soundscapes for three of Reiniger’s animated fairly tales in their live show Animagica, which has been touring Australia recently. Their instruments include violin, glassophone, musical saw and water-filled glasses. Below is a sampler of the performance, but you can also see more-or-less complete filmed performances of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty at YouTube.
The UK contemporary puppetry company Folded Feather recently built two large spectacular puppets out of car parts for Hyundai’s New Thinkers Index, a campaign ‘about new thinking and new possibilities’.
Previously: Folded Feather’s chickens
Shortly after the Kinect was launched in late 2010 Emily Gobeille and Theo Watson from Design I/O used it make a quick interactive puppet protoype by skeleton tracking on an arm. Their updated 2.0 installation above, Puppet Parade, looks great fun, allowing
children to use their arms to puppeteer larger than life creatures projected on the wall in front of them. Children can also step in to the environment and interact with the puppets directly, petting them or making food for them to eat. This dual interactive setup allows children to perform alongside the puppets, blurring the line between the ‘audience’ and the puppeteers and creating an endlessly playful dialogue between the children in the space and the children puppeteering the creatures.
The unedited clip where it is easier to see the movements in more focus is also interesting. Although these are made differently they share some qualities with Philip Worthington’s earlier Shadow Monsters.
This fantastic air-powered 16 foot tall spider puppet is made by Tim Davies. Wired.co.uk has more technical details about the structure and how it operates. (I think this information must come from the artist’s site, but it is down at the moment).
Kate Bush’s cool shadow puppet animation, Eider Falls at Lake Tahoe, was made to accompany a segment of the track Lake Tahoe on her new album 50 Words For Snow. In a note about the animation on her site she credits Robert Allsopp for the beautiful puppets.
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!
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.
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.
