shadow puppets

The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello

Posted by hil

Jasper

Another winner in the recent Australian Film Institute Awards was The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, which picked up Best Short Animation, and Oustanding Achievement in Craft in a Non-Feature, Production Design, for the director, Anthony Lucas. It caught my attention not only because it looks cool, but because it’s another example of the exciting work going on with shadow puppetry and new technologies that I mentioned in a couple of previous posts.

Back in October, Ward was really enthusiastic about seeing Jasper at the Ottawa Animation Festival:

Omigosh, I absolutely LOVED the next film… Is it stop-motion? CG? It’s a little bit of both and it looks entirely amazing. Harking back to the very first animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), Jasper is done in silhouette, like an elaborate shadow puppet play.

You can get a feel for film by looking at their wallpaper downloads. There is an interesting mix of silhouette and photographic detail. And I like the whimsy of the imagined world and the gazette; some of it is quite pointed. Too bad Jasper not going to be screened here in Canberra.

Anthony Lucas is from 3D Films, which specializes in clay and stop-motion animation for TV commercials, station IDs and special effects. It’s an interesting site to take a wander through. There are some precursors to Jasper. For instance, there are stills and making details of the SBS Station IDs that were done with silhouettes and organic materials to give them a handmade look, as well as a quick time movie of one of them. And the selection of images from their film Holding your Breath are great. I like the look of Bad Baby Amy, too.

Updates:
Lucas‘s Jasper Morello has been nominated for an Oscar in the best short animation catagory.
A review in The Age.
A short video clip from Jasper Morello.
Jasper Morello will be screening on SBS on Friday 10th March at 8.00pm.
The DVD of Jasper Morello, including a ‘making of’ featurette and other award winning films by director Anthony Lucas will be in shops on March 15th.

Updated 2015: broken links

The Theft of Sita

Posted by hil

Sita

(Photograph: Julian Crouch)

PuppetVision recently referred to The Modern Shadow where Michelle Zacharia is exploring combining Indonesian Wayang Golek puppetry and video and digital production techniques, and thinking about western influences in Indonesia. It reminded me of a production here called The Theft of Sita which was commissioned by the 2000 Adelaide Festival of Arts and received acclaim both here and overseas. It was a modern retelling of the Ramayana using shadow puppetry, and involved a remarkable collaboration of artists, puppeteers, makers and musicians.

The piece was written and directed by Nigel Jamieson (AU); music composed by the Australian jazz musician Paul Grabowsky (AU) and Balinese gamelon artist I Wayan Gde Yudane; designed by Julian Crouch (UK); and the puppetry directors were Peter J. Wilson (AU) and Balinese master I Made Sidia (who both performed in the show).

This Ramayana begins conventionally, but quickly explodes into a metaphor of the tumultuous events surrounding the overthrow of Suharto. Computer-generated images and photographic projections of demonstrations coexist with giant shadow puppet logging beasts. There are white water rafters and withering paddy fields in Bali. And Langka becomes a futuristic city of gleaming steel and glass towers, and of rubbish tips. Giant screens lift and disappear, perspective shifts from screens at the front to screens at the back of the stage. Shadow puppets emerge on tiny screens in the middle of the space and then shift again.

— Robin Laurie, Inside Indonesia, The Theft of Sita

Robin’s article is worth reading in full, as is Peter Wilson’s account in his book ‘The Space Between: The Art of Puppetry and Visual Theatre in Australia’, where he describes The Theft of Sita as a transformation of the ancient tale into a modern allegory of environmental politics.

Unfortunately I didn’t see The Theft of Sita, but I have seen a TV program that was made about it.

The designer, Julian Crouch, has a gallery showing some of the wonderful shadow puppets and scenes from the show, including the one above. His other galleries have some gems in them, too. Just a couple of examples: a dog, some huge figures, and some rather beautiful arresting star faces.

Update 2015: broken links; also, try a Julian Crouch google image search

Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets

Posted by hil

TwistedMichael 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)