workshop

FantiSea: Giant sea creatures in Esperance

Posted by hil

Haylis_logo (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:

day 07 lurk first fitup

Lighting up Ziggy, the leafy sea dragon:

3 ziggy lighting install-1

The gorgeous Dame Agatha, octopus:

6 dame agatha the painted lady

The crab (love this one!):

day 05 bruce & bryan in sailboat

The workshop shed full of finished puppets:

8 to this (wk 6 day 5)

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.

Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience: new slideshow

Posted by hil

Dino

(Photo credit: Craig Sillitoe)

Today’s online Sydney Morning Herald has a slideshow of new photos by Craig Sillitoe about the making of Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience with a narration by their Head of Creature Design, Sonny Tilders.

Previously: Workshop footage, Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience

Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience: Workshop footage

Posted by hil

Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience (see previous post) has released two videos of their awesome dinosaur puppetry:

Footage from the workshop
Torosaur v. Utahraptor

And here are a couple of stills from their newsletter.

Wwd_03

Steg
in the workshop. if you want an idea of HOW BIG this shows going to be, check out the size of the person working on the BABY brachi in the background (seen through Steg’s legs) … remember, he’s the BABY!

Wwd_14

Ankylosaurus in the workshop. To the right you can see one of the utahraptors in the making. There are two now in their final makeover stage and will be ready to wreak havoc with our first utahraptor who was one of the stars or the walking with dinosaurs launch, facing off with Torosaurus. (You can see someone behind the dino’s head, as an indication of scale)

I can see how you would come to call them affectionate things like baby Brachi and Steg if you were working on the build. I dare say they would have come in for a lot of swearing too! With only about five weeks till the first show in Sydney the makers must be under a lot of pressure.