puppets

Tarrengower Puppetfest

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

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

Phoebe Sparkles, a giant aerial puppet at Natimuk

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

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

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

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.

Folded Feather’s chickens

I love this excerpt from Folded Feather Theatre‘s production Life Still, which has been playing at the Edinburgh Fringe recently.

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.

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)