I love this excerpt from Folded Feather Theatre‘s production Life Still, which has been playing at the Edinburgh Fringe recently.
puppetry
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)
Snuff Puppets – Human Body Parts puppets
Snuff Puppets recently entertained crowds at Federation Square in Melbourne with their amazing Human Body Parts puppets.
Ladybird puppet
This is a ladybird glove puppet I recently made for the Riverstone Family Centre’s early literacy program. She has a little leather library bag over her shoulder in which she is carrying a little book!
There are some more photos of her in my photoset at Flickr, and a short video o f her.
The bravest man amongst them durst not touch her tail
Four-and-twenty tailors went to kill a snail,
The bravest man amongst them durst not touch her tail;
She put out her horns like a little Kyloe cow;
Run, tailors, run, or she’ll kill you all e’en now.
One of my upcoming projects is to build a remote control snail, so I’ve been gathering some information about snails. I’ve always rather liked snails, an attitude that is easy to keep when our ducks keep our garden virtually snail free. I always assumed that snails only ate plant matter, and had no distinguishable mouth on their faces, so to speak. How wrong I was!
Now looking at Snuff Puppets fabulous giant puppet snail, Mirabel, I see the mouth and tongue are quite a feature. At one point in this video it swipes just about all of someone’s fairy floss!
Never say no to Panda!
Funny!
Inception – done in 60 seconds
A 60 second version of Inception, drawing on the toy theatre tradition. Pretty accurate!
Norman Hetherington/Mr Squiggle tribute on iView
I was sad to hear a couple of days ago that Norman Hetherington, the creator and puppeteer of Mr. Squiggle had died. The ABC has made their Australian Story program on him available on iView as a tribute. I was delighted that it includes some behind the scenes footage that shows how Mr Squiggle is operated! Be quick though, it’s is only available to view for 6 days!
Previously:
- ‘Upside down! Upside down’ – the squiggle drawn for me at the Puppetry Summit, 2002
- Mr Squiggle and friends – photos of the puppets on exhibition at Unima2008, Perth.
