Check it: a rap version of Wordsworth’s I wandered lonely as a cloud, with MC Nuts, aka Sam, the Lake District Red squirrel mascot for Ullswater Steamers. It’s to celebrate the bicentenary of the poem’s publication.
(via Burningbird)
puppets
Street party tube men
I rather like this new ad for Tooheys beer, which features lots of those tall inflatable tube men as revellers at a street party. It was made by Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney.
Once upon a Coffee Cup
You might think I’m on a real anti-Howard bender today, especially since I’ve also just decided its time to stop posting to my Vigil blog, but I swear this video was found quite accidentally while I was trying out the new Alpha search engine (very cool). It’s such a good caricature, both in looks and voice, too funny to pass by (the ‘Go Aussie’ cracks me up!):
Once Upon a Coffee Cup is described as a A Greek-Australian fairy tale!, presented by The So-Called Elite, a group of ‘latte-drinking, chardonnay sipping, over-educated, under-achieving artists who have come together for the first time to perform in this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival’ under the direction of Matt Scholten and if theatre. It’s written and performed by Andrea Mina, Vaya Pashos & Shan Jayaweera. Show dates are April 17-28 2007, 6:30pm Evatt Room @ Trades Hall.Can anyone tell me who made the puppet?
Shan also has a nice earlier Howard/Bush cowboy spoof.
Update:
Thanks to Shan Jayaweera, the puppeteer behind the John Howard puppet, who contacted me to let me know a few more details! Shan hadn’t picked up a puppet until he did the one year puppetry course at the Victorian College of the Arts last year, but since then he has worked with Philippe Genty (visiting artist at the VCA), and with Spike Jonze (on the Where the Wild Things Are film adaptation).
The puppet in the Howard/Bush Brokeback parody was made by Shan, but he then got a classmate, Jemila McEwan, to re-do the head for Once upon a Coffee Cup. Jemila was a production student at VCA at the time, and did the puppet build
for the show they did with Genty.
Thanks again, Shan.
Thats the way you do it!
Ian Sharpe’s comment on the latest development in the travesty of justice that is David Hicks’ lot.
Million Puppet Project
It’s a bit crazy, even scary, to imagine a million puppets of all sorts in one place, but that’s the object of the Million Puppet Project which was launched yesterday (on World Puppetry Day) by Spare Parts Puppet Theatre in Western Australia. Under the project, people from around the world are invited to make and send a puppet to Perth, WA, to participate in a new Guinness World Record: The World’s Largest Puppet Display! This will be part of the UNIMA 2008 :: 20th UNIMA Congress and World Puppetry Festival, which is being held in the southern hemisphere for the first time.
If you need a jumpstart to make a puppet, there are various simple puppet design templates ready to dowload, or you can strike out on a design all your own. Let your imagination run free! Puppets will not be able to be returned to you, but they will be donated to charities afterwards. And when the display is being finalized in April 2008, you will be able to see the installation in progress via a web cam linked to the site.
Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience: a review
I finally caught up with Walking with Dinosaurs: the Live Experience during its season in Adelaide. The dinosaurs are absolutely fabulous; huge realistic reptiles with fluid movement, thunderous roars, grunts and lowing, and where appropriate, menace. To achieve this live on such a grand scale is impressive, and represents a great pooling of skills in the Creature Design and Build Team: design, engineering, mechanics, skin and sculptural fabrication, technical management and direction. I loved the vegetation that grew up around the arena, and flowered brilliantly; the stage elements that sprouted trees or in turn became volcanoes; and the lighting.
The show is a documentary in the round, or a live newsreel. A paleontologist provides commentary throughout the performance, taking the audience through the various ages of the dinosaurs, pointing out their features, and making the odd joke. Although I saw the need for this as a device to make the show cohesive, and as a way of giving an idea of the sheer size of the creatures, I found it annoying to be ‘educated’ constantly, especially when at times he had to almost shout to be heard over swelling music. Although the dinosaurs threaten each other and have great stand-offs, and at times are wonderfully fierce, the show lacks the emotional content that I think marks great theatre or puppetry; we are instead essentially watching a passing parade of specimens, and observing how they behave.
Perhaps, though, it’s just me, as I am dispassionate about dinosaurs, while the phenomenal popularity of the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs documentary series suggests most people are not. The producers picked up on that popularity as the impetus for the live show. They know where their audience is – families, especially those with kids aged about 4 through 12 – and everyone coming out of the stadium seemed happy. I imagine it will continue its success overseas, and I believe there is a second round of dinosaurs now going into production.
More links:
891 ABC Adelaide: Walking with Dinosaurs: Some details and pics about how they are operated :)
SMH: walk among the giants, but hold tight!: Short interview with the puppetry director, Mat McCoy. (cool to see your move to direction, Mat)
‘Making of’ pages from the program: 1, 2
Babushka’s WwD Flickr photoset: some backstage close-up photography
Hangingpixel’s WwD Flickr photoset
YouTube WwD videos
The Age video report: behind the scenes glimpses; Angela Dufty, one of the drivers, explains how they are controlled. (try IE if it won’t play on Firefox)
Previously:
Walking with Dinosaurs: the Live Experience: new slideshow
Workshop footage,
Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience
Ten Days on Earth: a real treat
(Honeydog awaiting his pink cranberry! waistcoat. Photo credit: Attit Patel, Toronto Life)
I caught Ronnie Burkett’s 10 Days on Earth up in Sydney last week, and it is a real treat. If you get a chance to see it, go!
The story is about Darrel, who is middle-aged and simple. His life revolves around his elderly mother, with whom he lives and on whom he is dependent, and various friends he regularly meets on his way to work as a shoe-shine boy. At the beginning of the play his mother dies, and we follow his gradual realization of what has happened, interspersed with flashbacks to other times in his life.
But there is also a play within a play, as, from time to time, Burkett reveals a separate smaller stage to tell the comic story of Honeydog and Little Burb, Darrel’s all-time favourite picture book. Honeydog’s search for an understanding of family and home gives Darrel his inner reality and context in life, including, at the end, an understanding of what has happened to his mother, and how life can continue. In other words, it’s beautifully scripted, as well as being wonderfully made and performed.
We stayed for Ronnie’s talk after the show, and it was a pleasure to hear him chat about the ideas behind the show, and many aspects of his work. He covers some of the same ground in Margaret Throsby’s interview with him on Thursday 22 Feb. I don’t know how long this interview will be available, so here is a back up. John Lambert has an excellent Ronnie Burkett page, which has reviews, technical details of the staging, a photo gallery, and a visit to the studio. I especially liked Liz Nicholl’s review, because it mentions Honeydog and his companions more than others. I also enjoyed Bryce Hallet’s account in the SMH.
FantiSea: Giant sea creatures in Esperance
(Cool festival image by Haylie Michelle)
Over in Western Australia, designer and maker Bryan Woltjen and animateur Karen Hethey have been engaged for the last few months on the huge task of designing and building 8 giant puppet sea creatures for FantiSea, which will be held on 22 March as part of the Esperance Festival of the Wind. The festival was at first an art-themed celebration of the positive energy wind brings to the town, and has now evolved into a celebration of ‘community, art, culture and shared fun’.
The building of the giant marine puppets is one of those great projects in which the participation of number of community groups, schools and individuals is integral. The festival’s Workshop Gallery has photos that were taken during the first phase of the build at the end of last year, when the ‘unskinned‘ puppets were built, and some of them were used in the inaugural Christmas pageant in Esperance. You can see how the frameworks are made from a mixture of bamboo and cane, with wire and gaffa joins. I love this picture of the unskinned eel! I would really like to be involved with making puppets of this sort sometime…
More recently during the second phase, the puppets have been skinned with muslin, dipped in diluted PVA, and dyed. Also, Karen Hethy is now teaching performers how to animate the giant puppets and doing stage rehearsals in conjunction with local scriptwriter, Derek Clarke.
Lurk, the shark:
Lighting up Ziggy, the leafy sea dragon:
The gorgeous Dame Agatha, octopus:
The crab (love this one!):
The workshop shed full of finished puppets:
You can click the photos to see them enlarged, and there are more photos here. I think they are wonderful! Thanks, Bryan, for sending me the photos and telling about it all, and I hope to be adding more photos of the actual event.
Update: Photos from the event have now been added.
Now a giant boy marionette
Today I came across this photo of a giant boy marionette, taken in Sydney’s CBD in late January. It’s very much like Royal de Luxe’s little giantess (who has been visiting Santiago, Chile, in the company of a rhinoceros) but I doubt he is theirs. Does anyone know the film company, or what production they were working on?
Update: A couple of people have uploaded videos of the puppet. Apparently it is to be in a Korean clothing commercial of some sort:
Marionette
Giant Puppet in Syndey
I assume this was a practice session, since the articulation has a way to go, but it’s interesting to see how tricky it is after the seemingly faultless performances by Royal de Luxe. The hips look a bit too wobbly as if they might need to go back to the drawing board, but the untidy looseness in the legs and arms lend a bit of boyishness at times. I wonder what it is made out of? I’d guess plastic not wood. I was really surprised that Royal de Luxe uses wood.
