Audrey, hands and more trash

When we arrived at the studio, Audrey immediately started sniffing the ground of the lobby, like she could tell her human was there. So I let her off lead and she started tracing the path, looking for her girl. Oh, what a happy reunion they had. It was really sweet. Audrey was vibrating with excitement.

I spent the rest of the day on the studio floor, except for lunch and a half-hour massage. I didn’t even unpack my computer. A lot of it was the basic stuff, fetching carts or standing around just in case the puppeteer needed something. But I did get to do some fun things as well.

Remember that shot we tried to do yesterday when the puppet was stuck to the floor with a piece of taffy? We shot it again today with the dugar firmly taped to the floor. But, it was in a different part of the set and we suddenly developed a lighting problem. I couldn’t be in the same relationship to the legs as I was yesterday because I cast a shadow that gave away the fact there was a puppeteer.

The shot we were doing used only his legs and then a brief moment of his hands reaching down to try to free his shoe. Yesterday, Thor was in front of the legs, and I was behind reaching over so that my hands came down at the right relationship to the puppet’s body.

Make sense? If I was in front of the body reaching down, it would look like the puppet’s hands were on backwards because my thumbs would point the wrong way. Except that today, I cast a shadow if I was behind his legs. The only place I could be was in front of the puppet. Too either side would put me in the shot. And here’s where we get into a lucky thing. I have hyper-mobile joints in my shoulders, so I can rotate my arms a full 360. That allowed me to twist enough to make it look like the hands were in the right relationship to his body.

I can also turn my feet backwards, (not all the way) but it’s never come in handy except as a party trick.

I did a little more livehanding for two of the puppets. It was a very busy day.

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