Swazzle puppet building tutorials and blogs

Posted by hil

 

swazzle

Swazzle, a San Francisco puppetry company doing live theatre, has started up a great online presence over the last six months or so. Their puppeteers and builders are blogging individually, but also as a team:

  • Swazzle News: up-to-date information on the company news, show dates and tours

They also have an interesting behind the scenes section, where you can follow the whole process of making some of their puppets. At the moment on his blog, Sean is showing how to make some pea puppets. They are pretty cute: look here and here at Puppet Greetings. Sean also has a valuable puppet building tutorial outlining how he made Ratchet,a cat in Swazzle’s show B.A.R.K. the Robot Dog.

Updated links 2015. Swazzle has a new website now.

Advertizing

Posted by hil

rejoice2
This is a cool idea: the Rejoice Giant Comb! According to How advertising spoiled me it was devised by Somak Chaudhury, an art director from Leo Burnett in Bangkok.

It makes me think of Rohinson Mistry’s novel, A Fine Balance, because the story starts with a vivid image of one of the protagonists buying a comb from a combseller on a train in India, and because hair is a recurrent theme. The book totally
mesmerized me when I read it in January – it’s the finest book I’ve read in a long time – and when I picked it up and paged through the first pages again the other day I realized that inaddition to everything else, it’s a perfect circle. I knew it ended
where it began, but everything at the begining resonates once you have read the whole.

I also recently came across an interesting Adidas advertizing campaign that was run in Berlin. The gist of it was to put up big more-or-less blank billboards, wait till they were covered in graffiti, and then paste over the top an outline of sneakers with cut-outs that showcased parts of the graffiti as the design on the shoe. If you want to trace the whole campaign, start here.

But both ads remind me of the ‘witchcraft’ of advertising in Peter Carey‘s Bliss.

Updated links 2015

Mechanized animal structures

Posted by hil

Fish3Vladimir Gvozdariki is a Russian artist who makes whimsical figures, animations and images. Some are pleasing in their simplicity, but I particularly like his complicated drawings of mechanized animal structures. They are in numerous places in his galleries, like here, here and here and here. I also like how some, like this fish, have made the transition from drawing to sculpture. I could imagine them being used theatrically, and some aspects -the whimsy and the technical details – remind me of some of Shaun Tan‘s creatures in The Lost Thing.

I also like Gvozdariki’s interest in snails and miniature worlds. How would you like to live here?

(via the wonderful BibliOdessy)

The Dollmaker

Posted by hil

Here is a slightly spooky thing to listen to when you are making a doll or puppet, as happened to me yesterday: The Dollmaker, a radio play by John Aiken. The doll becomes an alter-ego of its maker. I’m not sure how long the audio remains available, but give it a listen, its well done.

Another radio program I heard that caught my attention recently was about a puppet production, Operation, showing in Melbourne for the Next Wave Festival which was running at the same time as the Commonwealth Games. It was an interview with Sam Routledge, the co-director and puppeteer, and one of the graduates from the VCA post-graduate puppetry course, from which a new company, Blood Policy, has emerged. But I can’t find a trace of the interview on ABC Online.

I also heard an interview with puppetmaker Andrew McDougall a while ago, and was interested to hear that he is currently doing his Masters in Puppetry at the VCA, too.

I was wondering today — do we say puppetmaker in Australia, whereas in the US and other places they say puppet builder?

Update: I just happened across a website for Blood Policy’s Operation. It has a gallery with photos from the production.

Updated links 2015

 

Titereblog’s cool puppetry search engine

Posted by hil

Jose at titereblog has built a specialized puppetry search engine using Swiki. How cool is that! Thanks for the link to my puppetry links at del.icio.us (edited Oct 2014 – link now defunct), too, Jose.

I’ve just realized that my favourite puppetry blogs like titereblog and PuppetVision weren’t in my del.icio.us pages, because I am subscribed to their feeds, and read their posts as a matter of course. So I’ve added them now, and will try to add the other puppetry blogs I read as well. I’ve been meaning to make a proper list of them in my sidebar, too. Should get around to doing that.

From my garden

Posted by hil

I happened to notice this tiny baby gecko trapped in a spider’s web outside my studio window yesterday. It was only an inch or so long. At first I thought it was one of the little sleek brown skinks, as we have lots of those, and the gecko’s distinctive pads on its fingers were not easy to see. I’m fond of both, but especially geckos, and I don’t see them very often.

Baby gecho

It’s tail was very securely fastened to the web, which made me think it had been properly caught, rather than had just wandered into the web and got tangled. Perhaps the spider was waiting for it to weaken, because it hadn’t been poisoned or wrapped up more. I didn’t search for the spider, but maybe it was one of the black house spiders that live under the external window sills. After I had taken a few photos, I rescued the gecko and it ran away into the tanbark. It surprised me thinking about it afterwards that it hadn’t shed it’s tail to get away as both geckos and skinks can. Maybe tail shedding ability only comes with age?

Also from my garden, a moth with great camouflage, sitting on a towel on the washing line the other day. From other angles it was even more the colour of the towel. Underneath though, it was very colourful, and it had masked face like a bandit, and a shape that made me think of stealth bombers.

Moth bandit

There are a few more photos in my Backyard set at Flickr.

Follow-up to my mash-up post

Posted by hil

A friend told me that a Sydney church had already jumped on the bandwagon. I googled, I goggled, I gonquered:

bloody

 

I encourage them to go the whole hog and adopt my script (we can come to some arrangement) for a full-blown national media campaign. Mine has the distinct advantage of avoiding pointing the finger of blame and guilt for past demeanors, and suggesting a bit of head scratching and bemusement.

Updated links 2015

So where the bloody hell is the church mash-up?

Posted by hil

There is a curious $150,000 church advertising campaign on in Canberra at the moment. With the tag line ‘I’m not into religion, but I reckon a lot of what Jesus taught is pretty amazing’, it really makes me feel as if the institutional church knows they are up against the wall. Some of the banners outside the participating churches give the main impression of the face of a pretty girl, and the word ‘Jesus’. I always look for the exclamation mark…

I propose they would have more success with a mash-up of our controversial tourist ads, which have been almost banned in Britain (because of the ‘bloody’), in Canada (because of the beer – huh?), and now in the US (because of the ‘bloody’ and the ‘hell’ disturb the ‘family values’ mob):

  • We’ve brought you a wine (picture of chalice filled with wine)
  • And we’ve had the camels shampooed (3 wise men and camels)
  • We’ve saved you a spot on the pews (Lara Bingle in bikini smiles invitingly from pew)
  • And we’ve got the rockspiders out of the pulpit (squeaky clean bishop in pulpit – perhaps a woman?)
  • We’ve got the ghouls off the gravestones (ghosts exiting manicured graveyard)
  • And Peter is on his way down to open the front gate (St Peter at Pearly Gates)
  • The angel’s waiting (Gabriel)
  • And supper’s about to be served (Last Supper)
  • We’ve turned on The Light (flooding rays of holy light)
  • And we’ve been rehearsing for over 40,000 years (?) (celestial choir)
  • So where the bloody hell are you? (Lara again)

I’m fighting the temptation of making it into a flash movie myself, so if you want to do it and save me the trouble, go to it!

Updated links 2015

World Puppetry Day 2006

Posted by hil

It’s today… did you feel the earth move? Hmmm… neither did I. It’s worth reading Michael Mescheke’s international message for World puppetry Day, though: And all around us, this powerlessness is the true strength of the puppet. Because it is part of that “in spite of everything”, without which human beings would have perished long ago. (via Unima Australia, the blog I run for UA)