Just a reminder that the early bird period for registration fees for the 4th National Puppetry and Animatronics Summit in Australia will end in a few days. After 24 June you will have to pay the full rate, so jump in quickly.
The summit will be held in Melbourne, 5 – 8 July, 2012, and hosted by the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. The program is looking good, and I’m looking forward to it!
Lucas Ainsworth & Alyssa Hamel have a Kickstarter appeal going for these cool mechanical creatures made in kit form out of cardboard. The animal moves either with a manual winding mechanism, or by itself if you build in an additional the gear kit.
(via @dugnorth)
Flickr user avlxyz captured this nice photo of a bird puppet that looks and flaps it wings like a paper crane. It was appearing at Federation Square, Melbourne, during the Viva Victoria Festival 2012 in March, in celebration of cultural diversity. There’s a close up the birds head here.
The Royal de Luxe‘s Sea Odyssey Giant Spectacular that took place at the weekend in Liverpool to commemorate the Titanic centenary seems to have been a roaring success, with a huge turnout and press coverage. There are a great many photos and videos online now (including at Flickr), so I’ll only mention a few that interested me in particular.
Journalists from the Liverpool Echo were the first ever to be allowed to visit the company’s headquarters in Nantes and they have an article and brief behind the scenes video clip. This gives us a glimpse of the workshop, and interviews with the director who coordinates the teams of people who move the giants, and the Little Giantess’s movement conductor. I was interested to see La Machine viewed as a rival company! There seemed so much cross-over between the two that I’ve always assumed they were associated or sister companies!
I also hadn’t seen the Little Giantess dancing with joy before! At Flickr kingo62 has a great photo from the dance.
And I was taken with Xolo being washed and having his teeth brushed. His ears have great movement, they’re really expressive.
Previously:
For a long time Royal de Luxe had no website, then a very rudimentary one. Now they have a new one; great to see, though maybe not yet as expansive as you might desire!
Here’s a great photo of Xolo, Royal de Luxe‘s giant dog! It’s just been announced that Xolo will be appearing the Sea Odyssey Giant Spectacle in Liverpool in a couple of weeks time, along with the Little Giantess and her uncle, the deep sea diver.
Previously:
Handspring Puppet Company UK, the sister company to Handspring Puppet Company South Africa, has a major new dance theatre production called Crow premiering in mid-June as part of the Greenwich+Docklands International Festival in London. It is inspired by Ted Hughes’ 1970 poetic work Crow.
Crow witnesses God’s creation in the Garden of Eden and adds his own dry trickery to the events. Droll, lonely, adaptable, laughing, watching, instinctive and curious, Crow is in all of us, and in these poems Hughes presents the songs he would sing. – London 2012 Festival
The prototype puppet looks cool! (via the Telegraph.co.uk)
As does the illustration for the promotional material:
