Michael Gagne recently released a first series of short director’s cuts animations, Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets, that he created for Nickelodeon’s 2005 Halloween. For example, Nightmare is great. There is a short production diary, too. These are done in Flash, and looking at them it’s easy to see why puppetry and animation are so closely inter-related.
(via PuppetVision)
Here is a fabulous game of ping pong, Matrix style. According to Puppetry Films‘, it appeared on a Japanese Game Show to help celebrate the opening of the Matrix. Isn’t puppetry amazing?
Updated links 2015
The New York Times has a short slide-show of some of the sketches and models from the latest Wallace and Gromit movie, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I like seeing the armatures and insides:
Nick Park gives the commentary. I’m not a huge fan of Aardman, but I was sorry to see the Aardman Animation studios had burnt down last week, with many of the original drawings, wooden sets, paperwork, awards and other memorabilia lost.
Due to popular demand the National Museum of Australia has scheduled some extra performances of Gondwana by the Sydney company erth Visual and Physical Inc. You’ll have to be quick to book, as the last performances are this coming weekend.
The puppets are fantastic, as you might expect from erth, and with Bryony Anderson on the making team (I don’t know who else was on the team) . Some are wonderfully satisfyingly HUGE. Others have delightful characteristics, such as the Leptictidium’s twitchy nose. With one exception – the crocodile-y animal – the creatures moved beautifully. I loved the fine movements of the Meganeura, a gigantic primative dragonfly, and the Ammonites. One of the smaller dinosaurs shared a similar and effective design to some of the puppets in ‘The Lion King’, such as the warthog: the puppeteer visible in the middle, with the neck and head built out the front, and tail out the back. The baby Dryosaurs were just plain cute. And the inflatable lanscape and original soundscape were cool, too.
At the performance I saw the accoustics were dreadful. It was hard to hear any of the narration.
Its an interesting task to seek to satisfy both traditional theatre audiences as well as museum audiences. For the theatre goer, there was drama in seeing the creatures brought to life so well, but little story development aside from evolution. For museum audiences, which I assume are those whose interests are mainly historical and scientific – and there has been great attention paid to scientific accuracy in developing the show – there might be some unease about the artistic licence that allows the Liptictidium, a relative late-comer and ‘visitor from the Northern Hemisphere’, to appear through each era as a link throughout the performance.
The program leaflet gave lots of scientific detail. It would have been good if it had also credited the directors, performers, makers and production team, and given us some detail about the puppets.
Gondwana is the first of three shows which will be developed over the next three years. The second will cover time after the dinosaurs, and the third the present time and future of Australia. I’m looking forward to the next installment.
Update: Here are a few links:
Dinosaurs given new life
Interview with Phil Downing, Musical Director of Erth
Update 2015: broken links. Some photos of the puppets are at Erth > gallery > museums > scroll down. They are inaccessible for linking.
Take a look at ‘preparing boby’, netamir’s cool photo set at Flickr, which records the making of her first puppet from wire, paper mache, foam and fabric. I love his expressions, how involved and helpful he is with making himself, and his shape!
As I’ve commented before, I really find the look of this unfinished stage of making very attractive. Thank you for letting me use one of your images, neta :-).
The US Postal Service is commemorating Jim Henson and the Muppets with these cool stamps.
Here’s Kermit and Miss Piggy checking them out. I might have to see if I can get hold of a set somehow. Seems a long time since my brother and I used to race home from uni to be in time to catch Sesame Street when it was a new program here!
Boing Boing points to Kathi Zung, a NYC maker of foam latex puppets used in animated videos and films, and in particular to her Do-it-yourself Foam Latex Puppetmaking 101 tutorial on DVD. I’d like to try something like that sometime.
This is the same technique that was used to make the Leunig Animated series that brought Michael Leunig’s cartoons to life on SBS TV a few years ago. An exhibition showing how it had been made followed, and I loved being able to see in detail how it had been done. Strangely, while the animations themselves were really good, I felt some tension to do with the whole production of animating them weighing down the original whimsy of the cartoons.
Updated links 2015.
I was flipping around the channels on the TV a few minutes ago trying to find CNN. (This sounds nonchalant, but it really means beating the living daylights out of the remote to make it work). Instead, I landed up on the Information Channel – I have no idea what this usually shows, I will have to ask the kids – and much to my surprise it was showing tumblegum.com, a pilot show that I helped make puppets for in 1999. My puppet was Spike, the larrikin goanna, played beautifully by Peter Wilson, Australia’s most outstanding puppeteer. Here’s Spike on location at Googong Dam:
He was about 6 feet long, and had huge claws made from chopping board plastic (which incidentally is a very useful material, being relatively strong and soft to work). I have pictures of him lolling immodestly on our trampoline in the sun while his paint dried.
As far as I know the show never made it beyond the one-off pilot, though it was marketed with great optimism overseas at Cannes and in China, so it was unexpected and good to see it at least getting a showing. As a puppet maker, you have to get used to the reality that the time it takes to create a puppet is usually quite out of proportion to the time it’s actually on stage or screen. So it’s a nice feeling when their lives are extended into another season, or the show tours here or overseas for some years to come.
I’ve been busy making two of those poseable wooden manikins that artists use to draw from into small puppet versions of two actors, a man and a woman. Its been fiddly, since to make the proportions right, I had change the shapes of the bodies, and the length of the limbs, which in turn means undoing the joints and shortening some of the springs that tension them . Really, the manikins are quite odd around the hips. I read that these deluxe guys have a lot more movement than the wooden ones, but they just make me laugh! And the woman is frightening!
Its a strange range of other poseable figures you can get supposedly to draw from. Horses, dinosaurs and giraffes are carried by our local art store. I know people buy them just because they are cool, but I like to imagine instead that there is a thriving subculture of ‘giraffe artists’ for instance.
I’m not participating in the Month of Softies this time. Partly I’ve been short on time, but I also wasn’t inspired. And while I think moving it to Flickr was more than understandable, I find that I feel differently about it over there. I’m not sure why.
