For years, while I worked at Tears of Joy, and then after, Lance Woolen was my Technical Director. The man is brilliant. Even today, living in NYC, if I run into a question of how to build something, I call Lance. If he tells me something is not possible to build, then it’s not. But […]
AMC — Talking Shop With Coraline Puppeteer Lance Woolen Read More »
To begin, I need to take the rods of the taxidermy lamb form that I’ve ordered. These are intended to make it easy to mount the lamb on a board, but I won’t be doing anything like that. It will be laying in the back seat of a car, partially in a bag. Next, I
I believe this show had what we call a high pee-factor. Perhaps the child is watching security theater. Via Puppet Buzz
Puppets? I hate puppets. Read More »
Over at Boing Boing Gadgets there’s an interview with Michael Chertoff on the TSA and “Security Theater.” Towards the end of the interview excerpt, there’s this section. Joel Johnson: Sir, I was really trying to avoid using this term [security theater] at all. But are you actually saying that security theater is an important aspect
Michael Chertoff on the TSA and “Security Theater” Read More »
I’ve really been enjoying the series of interviews at the Nebula Awards site. Today’s is with Adam Rex, author and illustrator of Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich and The True Meaning of Smekday. During the interview, Charles Tan commented that he enjoyed the puppet video on Mr. Rex’s site. Naturally, I had to click through and
Adam Rex | The Nebula Awards Read More »
Sometimes when dealing with props I can’t find the real thing or even a replica of it, so I just have to make it. In this case, we needed a Pictish helmet as one of the apparitions in MacBeth. The halloween stores had loads of helmets, but were strangely lacking in anything Pictish. Spartan on
Jeremiah Tolbert turned me onto this interesting video about a form of motion capture that animates what appear to be Javanese shadow puppets. Â Pretty neat technology. Reverse Shadow Theatre from gabor papp on Vimeo.
As happy as I am to see a puppet related item make national news, I wish it wasn’t this. There are many ways to measure California’s tanking economy: an 8.2 percent unemployment rate; a multibillion-dollar state budget gap; threatened endowments of the city’s museums, causing some cultural institutions to nearly default on mortgages; and the
Forget Citigroup, Puppet Show Needs a Bailout Read More »
I spent the afternoon and much of the evening with Michael Schupbach, the puppet designer for MacBeth, as we did last touches on the puppets. I am pleased to say that, barring disaster, we are finished. We went out for dinner afterwards and a much-deserved beer. I think both of us felt like we’d been
MacBeth = finished Read More »
What I said I need a mounted woodcock. Someone stole the bag of extra body parts. Why are you puckering? I had to unplug the time machine. Where are the monkey balls? It’s between the barfing panda and the orange fuzzy man. I’m really looking forward to mounting his head. I just need to cut
Again, with the things said at work Read More »
Papier-mache is one of the oldest forms for creating puppets and so a lot of people think that there must be something better out there. Actually, there are very few contenders. Done well, papier-mache is light, strong, fast, and non-toxic. I know, we’ve all had the experience of the lumpy paste, and corners that stick
To catch you up on what I spent the last several weeks building, I’m going to be posting some photos that I took during the build. The wood witch needed hands capable of picking things up. Fortunately, you can find such a thing in your local neighborhood hardware store. This trick won’t work for a
Wood witch’s grabber arms Read More »
So, I was building this collar for Hecate and you know, it’s late and there are all these spare bones lying about. Some of the pieces I couldn’t use, like the pelvis, because it was so shoddily constructed that it didn’t really look like a pelvis if it wasn’t attached to the skeleton. What did
Late night with a plastic skeleton Read More »
This is an amazing resource. The Center for Puppetry Arts, where I intered lo these many years ago, has opened a virtual puppetry museum which has 91% of their collection online. I can’t tell you what an amazing thing this is. I remember spending hours in the museum when I was there. It didn’t matter
Center for Puppetry Arts, virtual museum Read More »
I’m going to try to use an analogy to explain how frustrating it is when you are working on a puppet and it breaks right before you finish. Imagine that you are almost finished with a short story or novel, you’ve been very careful and been backing it up as you go. Something goes wrong
My current level of frustration Read More »