puppets

Coldplay puppets

Posted by hil

coldplay1

The Coldplay puppets from the Life in Technicolour ii video are touring the world rather like those garden gnomes that get abducted and send back postcards from exotic places. They have been down under recently: above you can see them with the Perth city skyline in the background, and last weekend they were sunbaking in Bondi. You can follow them here.

The interview with Dougal Wilson, the video director, gives some information about the making of the puppets. They were designed by Wilson, and the idea was to make them look like Punch and Judy caricatures, rather than close look-alikes for the band members. They were sculpted in clay by Nonny Banks, rendered in fibreglass and painted to look like wood.

Summer Knits High / We Can Knit Heroes

Posted by hil

If you are a Chris Lilley fan – and I know that’s not everyone  – check out vagueknitting‘s photoset Summer Knits High / We Can Knit Heroes with the byline: Cute finger puppet idea becomes preposterously overgrown Chris Lilley fangirl project. I specially like Jonah Takalua, but then I had a soft spot for him in the series, too.

The Promise

Posted by hil

Little elephant and boy puppets

Remember the little elephant and boy puppets I was working on last year? Here are some pictures of how they turned out. They were for the Flying Fruitfly Circus production The Promise, which premiered at the Sydney Festival about a month ago. The build for the show was quite big, and largely undertaken by Tim Denton and Annie Forbes in Melbourne, but I was asked to make these little ones and a life-size elephant trunk (more of the trunk soon in another post). The designer was Richard Jeziorny, whom I really like working with.

Little elephant and boy puppets

Little elephant and boy puppets

It’s part of the business that directors sometimes need to alter significantly or completely cut scenes and props, and in this case the elephant was altered or remade in Melbourne so that it could have more head movement than the original design. I was given the opportunity to do it, but couldn’t take it on at the time. It looks from this picture as if it was covered and the head possibly remade completely.

promise_rev

The production received great reviews such as this at the Australian Stage Online. I’d like to see it one day if they tour up this way.

Previously:
A little heffalump
Playing
Studio pics
Nearly done

Yes, Virginia, there is a puppet I’m afraid

Posted by hil

Virginia

I’m fond of Virginia Woolf, and her writing has influenced some of the ways I look at the world. I’m not sure if that explains why I wanted to make a puppet of her or not! I do find, though, that the making process itself allows me to understand and meditate in a unique way on what that person was like, and I end up feeling I know more about them than before. From that point of view the result doesn’t matter much. However, I would have liked to capture her beauty more, and her look is rather alarmingly intense. I’ve read she could be, but she wasn’t all the time, like my puppet.

Virginia

Virginia

I started making Virginia quite a while ago, and was trying out some experimental techniques and materials. I tried an air dry clay for modeling her face and hands. I wouldn’t chose it again because I don’t think it is very durable. I also wanted to see if I could build the arms and legs using tubes for the straight bones, round beads for the joints, and elastic running through them to keep them tensioned, then covering them with padding and fabric. There was too much play in them, and the limbs twisted. At this point Virginia got put aside.  But now I’ve re-built her with good joints, and her feet are weighted nicely. She stands about 50cm (20 inches) tall.

I really like her outfit, and her shape and movement; she is satisfying to hold and play with (my kids had her doing the Time Warp the other night), and she is very much a small presence around the house.

Virginia

Nice Carnival’s huge dragon puppet

Posted by hil

dragonnice

(photo:  rafael rybczynski)

My interest was piqued by photo #32 in the Big Picture’s post about Carnival. It’s an impressive dragon puppet float that took to the streets in the Nice Carnival recently. I don’t know who made it, but there are resonances with Royal de Luxe’s giant puppets, for instance the carving of the head, elements of the construction and operation and the way it breathes smoke.

There are some photos at Flickr. In particular, Sparrowlight has a cool sequence of photos of the dragon, including a couple of short videos, here and here ; there is a shot of the puppeteers;  and debs-eye caught the dragon at rest (click to see enlarged):

dragonnice2

Plastic dummies in Galeries Lafayette

Posted by hil

Plastic dummies in Galeries Lafayette

Galeries Lafayette in Paris has more dummies than you can poke a stick at. I liked these ones, made out of something like polypropylene sheeting snapped together. Maybe you could make interesting puppets with this construction?

Plastic dummies in Galeries Lafayette

Upside down! Upside down!

Posted by hil

mr.squiggle

I get a lot of interest in my photos of Mr. Squiggle and friends, so I thought people might like to see the squiggle that Mr. Squiggle (aka Norman Hetherington) drew for me personally at the Puppet Summit in Melbourne in 2002. I guess over the years he has drawn them for many people!

La Princesse

Posted by hil

475px-la_princesse1

This great spider is one of the newest creatures by the French company, La Machine (that I posted about a few days ago).  Known as la Princesse, her performance in the streets of Liverpool, England, last September was a highlight of  the 2008 European Capital of Culture celebrations there. She was commissioned by Artichoke, the company who brought Royal de Luxe‘s Sultan’s Elephant to London a few years ago.

A giant spider conjures up dramatic visions of Shelob, huge rearing fangs, giant trapdoors, buildings being webbed in, or the populace being picked off one by one and spun into food parcels, tasty morsels for later. But in one of the BBC videos, her creator, Francois Delaroziere, described the emotion he wanted to provoke as ‘sweet and in love’.

There are squillions of photos of la Princesse online now; here a few links as starters:

Flickr pool
La Machine’s webpage on the event
Main BBC webpage (portal) about the event
Revealed: The secrets of the 50ft robo-spider – ‘There is never a dull moment in Liverpool’ :)

The terracotta warrior and the girl

Posted by hil

This giant marionette performance was presented at the Beijing Olympics last year by the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson.  It derives directly from Royal de Luxe’s giant puppets, but the story is about a Chinese girl and a butterfly awakening one of the terracotta warriors.  If you dig down in Johnson & Johnson’s site, you can see the trailer, the story board and some cool photos of how the puppets were made.  The tie to the theme of  J&J caring seems somewhat tenuous to me, but never mind!

The companies Poetic Kinetics and AiRealistic who were commissioned to design and develop the puppets and rig, both have interesting galleries of the process. And Bankai has a Flickr photoset.