A blog about the cross-pollination of ideas, creative expression, communication, and the laws & technologies supporting (or hindering) the above.
(Oh, and a bit about me too.)
One of the best ways to learn video puppetry, in my opinion, is to lip-synch to songs. It's how Jim Henson started -- he used the local TV station's record collection of Stan Freberg comedy sketches as well as popular songs. When I started LifeFormz, I discouraged new puppeteers joining us from jumping right into character dialog work.
"Aww, come on Brian!" they'd say. "This is just for fun, who cares if my head's in the scene or my puppet's head is flapping?" Well actually, the audience does. Do it right and the audience will believe in the character and respond to it. Do it wrong and it may laugh at how bad the puppet's moving or the funny dialog, but it won't have any connection to your character.
So when we started, all we did were music videos and very few spoken bits. With songs, we could focus on these techniques first:
Proper lip-synch
Eye gaze
Rhythmic choreography
This music video (to the song "Livin' In the Fridge" by Weird Al Yankovic) was actually one of the last clips I worked on before graduating and it was finished and shown after I left. Unfortunately, you can tell -- note the difference in lip-synch of the red monster for the song up until he gets pushed into the fridge. Head-flapping! Stiff! Heh. Oh well. I think it turned out rather well despite my absence.
I love how we somehow found a real fridge, yanked off the door and attached it to a fake fridge interior with holes in the back. Making all the food puppets was really fun. We learned a lot about coverage -- how do we fill up the time with the lead singer, cut to close-ups of activities inside the fridge, and keep things reasonably consistent. The psychedelic sequence was really fun to make although it's a bit crude. (Layers of S-VHS tape being duplicated over and over just don't hold up, apparently.)
One of two sketches called "In Search of the Unsolved, Mysterious, Unexplained, Unknown Things We Do Not Know Anything About."
How We Did It:
Bertrand Crumb in front of green screen, long shot to make him small.
Two 1 1/2 foot or so rod & mouth puppets of Stonehenge on a table in front of a black screen, medium-shot to make them seem big.
Both these are done at the same time, with the Amiga Video Toaster doing the Luma-key of a blue sky with clouds and the JVC analog switcher doing a Chroma-key of the result behind Bertrand Crumb.
*sigh* Ok, I had promised you some LifeFormz footage months ago (last year in fact), but I became frustrated with the results of digitizing the 15 year-old VHS tape I had -- bad sound, all washed out or too dark, and generally crappy. But just this past week I discovered I had another, much better tape. Yay!
So here's one of everybody's favorite sketches, Mr. Stick. Brian Flumen came up with the idea of a silent film actor who happened to be a stick. Somehow we evolved it into having a historical film host guy showing off a few of Mr. Stick's films, Mr. Stick Goes to Town, and the sequel, Mr. Stick Comes Back from Town, plus Mr. Stick Walks His Dog.
Brian performed the voice of the host here while I simultaneously listened and lip-synched along in front of a green screen Chroma-keyed (using an old JVC analog video switcher) with footage taken from U.Penn's Fine Arts Library. Besides wanting Brian to perform, the reason we did it this way was that Penn's UTV Station did not have good microphones in the studio at the time, only in the control room. That's why sadly, most of our sketches did not involve multiple characters speaking. Separately, Brian also performed Mr. Stick himself in front of a green screen with a Chroma-keyed image taken from a book of old streets we found somewhere.
Oh! The piano music... Well, in the grungy basement of the studio, back in a far storage closet, Steve and I found a piano, and one day, a young woman was practicing on it. We asked her if she would play something ragtimey, so she played The Entertainer. Perfect! Steve ended up speeding it up old-school style, by dubbing it off of one S-VHS player to another that was recording at a slower speed. Man, we would have LOVED having Logic or ProTools back then.
The Amiga Video Toaster provided the film-look and black-and-white FX.
One technical challenge we faced was that we could not do compositing after the fact like you can today. So anything being Chroma-keyed had to be ready, up and running in either the JVC switcher or the Amiga Video Toaster, or in some cases both! That also meant we needed enough people on hand to operate everything, essentially live. Although editing-wise, we often shot in a film style. This drove UTV nuts because we used WAY more S-VHS tape than everyone else and we produced episodes much much slower than they would have liked. (Not to mention the fact that our puppets and building materials were slowly taking up a huge section of UTV's office!) Cié la vie. We had a hit show and it won a Student Emmy, so they stopped complaining eventually.
Up next, "In Search of the Unknown Unexplained Mysterious Things We Do Not Know Anything About".
I just got back from Vegas this weekend, my first time there. Naturally I'd heard all about some amazing Cirque du Soleil shows there, like "O", "Mystere", and "Zumanity," but when I got there, my native Las Vegan friends told me they loved a newer show called "KŔ".
Well, they couldn't have picked a better show for me to see.
Imagine if you will a multi-story tall auditorium stage that appears to have no bottom, out of which a myriad of theatrical environments emerge. A ship atop a stormy sea. A sandy beach. A monstrously high cliff. A wall for shadow puppets. Battlefields. A forest. Or, during the pre-show, intermittent bursts of flame. To the left and right are illuminated copper cage towers. Think H.G. Wells meets Ewok tree condos on Endor.
Of course there are the Cirque trademarks -- dancers, acrobats, twirlers, and people flying through the air. (If you have not seen a Cirque show, go rent Mystere, Quidam, or Dralion and come back. Or better yet, go see Varekai or whatever tour is out there now live) There is the fantastic music. Though in KÀ, the music is blended with extravagant sound effects, playing through speakers in everyone's seats. But this is the first of their Vegas shows to have a plot*, albeit a relatively simple one. Two twins are kidnapped and must be rescued across varied landscapes full of strange creatures and peoples.
Hmm. Sound videogame-esque? We'll touch on that shortly.
Unbeknownst to me while I was watching it, the Cirque du Soleil troupe brought in two of my theatrical heroes, Robert Le Page and Michael Curry to work on it, as director and puppet fabricator respectively. I wrote a review of Robert's amazing earlier work "The Far Side of the Moon" back in 2001 and got to talk with him a little about how he was experimenting with moving set technology and puppets. Of course, Michael Curry is the genius behind the Lion King Musical puppets, masks, and its morphing cliff stage.
The fusion of all these talents adds up to an unbelievable, jaw-dropping, almost indescribable experience. However, I think I've stumbled upon the right analogy here, although please don't assume I mean to undermine its theatricality in any way: KÀ is part live-action, ultra-high production value videogame sequence, part Cirque du soleil show, part martial arts.
To make my point, here is the state-of-the-art in camera-oriented videogames Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii™:
Now picture something along these lines, right in front of you, live with human beings, scaled to the size of a good-sized hotel. (Ok, not a giant orb spinning but I wouldn't put it past these guys to do something like that next time.) A giant spinning rectangular plane. Two, actually, both acting as stages so capable of transforming they might as well be virtual.
In a sense, KÀ really is part videogame with its use of real-time, tracked projected animations. The larger of the two stages in KÀ is not limited to physical texture, thanks to a clever use of computer vision and projection techniques. It becomes a cliff, or the dark sea with bubbles following a diving actor. Through the combination of this and flying rigs, the stage becomes more like the eye of the camera, with moves previously reserved for Film and now videogames.
Will this make good theatre? Or just another technological exercise like the motion captured, virtual camera move-fests of recent Zemeckis films like The Polar Express and Beowulf? We will see.
Coming soon, I'll try to go into more detail about how this technology works and how it will change live theatre.
During the mid-1990s when there were still quality Saturday Morning Cartoons on the major networks, ABC had an excellent stop-motion animated show called "Bump In the Night" involving a monster under the bed (Mr. Bumpy), his neurotic side-kick toilet-bowl cleaner monster Squishington, their pal Molly Coddle, and various other toys and creatures living within the household of a boy and his sister.
Great talent worked on this show, including its creators Ken Pontac & David Bleiman. Many animators and fabricators had come off of Nightmare Before Christmas and some moved on to Pixar (which released its groundbreaking Toy Story a year later). Most of original songs during the Karaoke Café segments (shown separately) were written by none other than Jeff Moss, legendary Sesame Street composer of "Rubber Duckie," "One of these things is not like the other," and "I Love Trash." The animation was all done in the States. Voices were provided by Jim Cummings, Rob Paulsen (Animaniacs, Pinky & The Brain), and Gail Matthius.
In 2003 I had the pleasure of having a drink with Ken Pontac in Sausalito. He had been trying to teach an extension class called "Creating an Animated Series" about developing and pitching. Naturally I jumped at the chance, but only I and one of my friends signed up -- twice! Both times it was canceled due to lack of enrollment. Damn! Had it been in L.A. would it have worked? I don't know. But I knew who he was from Bump In the Night and was very happy to hang out with him for an afternoon. Recently he's been working on "Happy Tree Friends" cartoon series.
I managed to tape every episode (each contained 2 segments and a "Karaoke Café" song) aired onto high quality VHS tape back in 1994, but unfortunately I overwrote one by mistake, "Adventures in Microbia" & "Not a Peep." Ugh. So during my archiving project I intend to make the best of these available online, as I've only seen small, badly-recorded clips on YouTube so far. Unfortunately, the YouTube compression really mangles the opening sequence (full of camera moves and pans), but the episode itself looks okay. Ken mentioned back then he would like to get everything out on DVD, but I'm sure it'll take a while... It took 13 years to get another great animated series of that time, The Tick, onto DVD.
UPDATE: I found a better way to compress the videos such that youtube will accept them and they look better. Basically, I'm using H.264 with a bitrate of 1000.
Bunraku performers and fans gather after some late night Japanese beer following the show.
On Friday some friends and I went to see an authentic Japanese Bunraku theatre performance in Little Tokyo. Apparently, this is the first time in 20 years that an official Japanese troupe has toured in the U.S. I was happy to see it was a full house and not just puppeteers, although my friend Sam had rallied a lot of us puppeteers and got us a discount. He also acted as translator after the show when two of the performers and a few fans went out for drinks afterwards.
The staging and sets were gorgeous. A huge curtain with silk-like metallic decoration opened to reveal Japanese landscapes including a temple wall, a precipice and the Underworld itself. I particularly liked the use of a real tree, which moved organically. Above the stage, a large screen showing English supertitles. To the right, the narrator and the musicians playing shamisen (guitar-like instruments played with a big wedge pick).
What was the show like? Well, writing about a puppetry performance is a bit futile in my opinion. The whole point is to fall for the magic moment where your mind thinks that there's a living thing on stage, despite the fact that it's actually a doll with three people behind it. One great thing about this show is that the director of the theatre presented and translated a demonstration by the performers, explaining how the puppets work, what the narrator does, what the musicians do to enhance the story. This was brilliant and really made the show itself accessible to everyone. Also, in part of the show, a musician puppet came out playing a shamisen. This puppet's performance matched the music and the fingering of the real musician pretty much exactly! Great attention to detail. (When have you ever seen an animation or a puppet performance of a character playing a musical instrument where the fingering was accurate??)
The troupe and bunraku puppetry itself originate in Osaka, Japan. The government subsidizes the troupe almost entirely. Apparently, it's not especially popular in Osaka itself (indeed, my friends there hadn't even heard of it), but the shows in Tokyo are often sold out.
I asked them (over some Sapporo) how old the stories were and whether new ones were being written. They said that the most recent one was 130 years-old, but the ones considered "classics" are 300 years old. There are some new ones out there they said, but by the way they shook their heads disapprovingly, it was clear these were inferior to the classics.
Good grief! It doesn't feel so long ago, but sometime in the Fall of 1992 I raced back to the Penn campus via train from NYC (my first time there), having just seen a life-changing presentation at the Museum of TV & Radio about Jim Henson. The guest panel included Frank Oz, Jerry Nelson, Jane Henson, the late Jon Stone, and Michael Frith. I had a mission. When asked by an audience member "What should we do or study to become Muppeteers?", Jerry Nelson half-seriously blurted out "Computers!" and after the laughter died down, Jane Henson suggested "Cable Access Television." One of the brightest lightbulbs ever lit up over my head because I was already doing BOTH, at Penn's University TV Station (UTV) and doing some modeling & animation work for graduate & PhD Computer Graphics students at Penn's Center for Human Modeling & Simulation. There was no question about it, it had to be done. Yes, I was going to attempt to create a TV show with puppets and animation. But what to call it?
I'm not entirely certain when or how I arrived at the name of the project, but at some point I mentioned it to my good friend at the time, Steve, and he nodded approvingly. I printed up some flyers using my Atari ST & its ginormous laser printer advertising a new student group / experimental puppetry and animation show. We plastered them over campus, not entirely certain of the people who would show up to the first meeting. After all, Penn back then was NOT known for any sort of visual arts training. The Annenberg School of Communications was there, but its film & video classes had long been shut down because the Dean "did not want Penn to be a trade school." Bummer! Even its theater department (as I found out later when I set up an independent study to do the show) emphasized theory and academia over actually doing anything. So we sat at a table in Houston Hall, and waited for whoever showed up.
We started with a few women interested in building puppets, four computer scientists, an English major, and one artist. The next few meetings involved sitting at Houston Hall with trash bags of foam, glue guns, and fabric, but over the next year we took over a large chunk of UTV station with our puppets and materials. We had no scripts at first -- our model was Jim Henson's earliest show "Sam & Friends," and the earliest of those that involved only lip-synch and musical numbers. (It was frustrating to many of our members not to jump right into voices and elaborate sketches, but truthfully, we were not ready.) But the puppets evolved over time (after scrutinizing various Muppet & puppet-making books), and we got pretty good at using the limited 70s and 80s era video equipment. (The most modern thing in the station? An Amiga Video Toaster, which we mastered better than anyone else at UTV)
Towards the end of 1993 we became one of the most popular UTV shows (apparently our demographic was "stoners") and had grown to about 35 members and volunteers. We started experimenting with then state-of-the-art software for the Mac, Quicktime, hooking it up to a PowerGlove a couple years before Quicktime VR or other various image-based digital puppetry attempts came along. We even did a live performance, using puppets that played foam drum MIDI-triggers we rigged up.
Then, inspired by another student* at Northwestern who had won a Student Emmy for her puppetry TV show "Freeform" we submitted an edit of our show to the same competition. We won a Regional Student Emmy . Not bad, considering our competition was from Film Schools, and had budgets of $10,000 and one even starred Mel Gibson. Ours? $300 maybe) It was incredibly surreal to attend the Award ceremony in Beverly Hills, sit at a table with other award-winning students and get a photo taken with Brent Spiner (who says "lifeforms" quite a bit on Star Trek: Next Generation episodes).
Needless to say, it was a wonderful time in my life. It tickles me now that some very talented people passed through our group who later went on to be big shots working at Electronic Arts, ILM, Weta, and technical artists featured in WIRED magazine. One guy who never had time to work on the show (despite my nagging) who designed a recruiting poster for me went on to co-found Gnomon School of Visual FX.
Here we are 15 years later... Very soon you will get to see some video clips. About time, huh?
And now you know why the domain for this site is called "Lifeformz."
* Who was that student, you ask? Stephanie D'Abruzzo, who went on to work for Sesame Street and later became the co-star of the original (off and on Boadway) Avenue Q!
I love this sketch from the early 70s. Simple "limbo" set. The humor is in the wacky lyrics, timing, choreography, dynamics of the music, and the contrasts and reactions between the characters. Lovely little rhythm guitar going on in the background (making the tempo feel faster than it really is). Great use of the screen space -- Jim Henson came up with the idea of using wide-angle lenses in video puppetry to give great depth of field, so the main singer puppet isn't moving back all that far, but it looks like he is.
Ventriloquist Terry Fator Wins America's Got Talent!!
I had been out of the country during the odyssey of this amazing performer, but brother Henry alerted me to Terry Fator's "What a Wonderful World" rendition (see bottom video). Have a look at this footage, especially this first one that blew judges David Hasselhoff and Sharon Osbourne away...
Etta James, anyone?
Friends in Low Places indeed!
Unfogettable, considering we're watching a man do Natalie Cole's voice???
Ventriloquism has seldom impressed me. Even the communities behind puppetry and ventriloquism have had a long history of staying separate, seldom intermingling. But I think Terry may have bridged the gap, and even presented these dying arts to millions of new fans.
I never watch these so-called "reality" or talent show-based shows. One can stand so many above average singers and dancers. Am I in the right universe? Somehow, a brilliant ventriloquist won this year! You can picture me on the couch (if you want) smiling like a madman when on tonight's show Finale the audience and judges adorned sock puppets, lip-synching along to Terry's singing puppet.
But unlike Terry or me, their mouths were moving. Mine was stuck wide open.
This is the reason why I don't like organised tours when traveling. What tour would take you to a little store of marionettes in downtown Tokyo? Fortunately for me, the Puppet House (Japanese-only website) was mentioned in my Lonely Planet travel guide. Upstairs is a small room filled with hand-carved marionettes and finger puppets from the Czech Republic, Germany, and the United States. Almost all are performable; however, co-owner Takuro Fukazawa explained to me that many are too small for an audience beyond yourself. "Personal puppetry," he calls it. Either way, the puppets are gorgeous, moving or not. He pulled out a "simple" marionette, showing me how to make it walk with balance. Then he handed over the controls to me. Ooops! Well, in my hands, the puppet character exhibited all sorts things: "anti-gravity," "drunkenness"... perhaps "epilepsy." Certainly not balance.
Had I the money and display space I would have bought several beautiful puppets I saw there. Fortunately, you can order them through their website, although it's Japanese-only. I recommend a visit!
Brother Colin wrote in to tell me his buddies Robert Lopez, his wife Kristen, and Michael Morgan worked on the amazing Finding Nemo: The Musical down in Orlando, Florida at Disney's Animal Kingdom themepark.
There has been some amazing old footage of Jim Henson and the Muppets (pre-Sesame Street, pre-Muppet Show) showing up on YouTube lately. This example demonstrates the back-breaking work it took to produce a Muppet commercial for Wilson's Meats.
It may seem crazy in this computer graphics-laden world, but it seems like it's easier than ever to get started in animatronics and robotics as a hobby.
Here, for example is ALEX, a simple animatronic kit from BPE Solutions. You can upgrade it to make it talk automatically with audio. Buy lots of them and have your own Picasso-meets-Disney Theme Park ride!
They also offer an animatronics book for the aspiring Faz Fazakis or Stan Winston in your life.
Interesting New York Times article about how a theatre company is using an old-fashioned technique in new ways for creating special effects in live performance.
The Eyeliner system makes use of an old stage trick called Pepper’s Ghost that by most accounts was first seen onstage in an 1862 production of Charles Dickens’s “Haunted Man,” at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London. John Henry Pepper (1821-1900) is usually credited with discovering the illusion, though an engineer named Henry Dircks was really first to suggest placing an angled piece of plate glass between audience and actors, allowing off-stage objects or people to “appear” reflected on the glass as if they were onstage. When the off-stage lights were turned off, the ghosts seemed to vanish.
With Eyeliner, the unwieldy glass pane is replaced with a lighter, nearly invisible screen invented by Uwe Maass, the managing director of Event Works, a company in Dubai. Another company, Vision4, from Denmark, holds the licensing rights for New York.
I just found this instructional DVD on how to sculpt a fairy, taught by the wife of Brian Froud, master illustrator of Goblins and Fairies in books and in Jim Henson movies like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal!
Elizabeth Luce, long time collaborator and friend to Roger Mara wrote me to let me know there's going to be a gathering for friends, fans, and puppeteers who knew and loved the late great Roger Mara, whom I had the pleasure and honor of knowing while I was on the board of the San Francisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild.
If you're able to be in the Bay Area this May, come celebrate with us!
A Celebration of Roger Mara's Life October 20, 1953 - January 15, 2007
We are glad to announce a gathering for the celebration of Roger Mara's life. Friends, Family, Cohorts, and Fellow Puppeteers are all welcome! Please spread the word!
Saturday, May 26th 11:00 AM to 2:30 PM Fireside Room, Lucie Stern Center 1305 Middlefield Road Palo Alto, CA 94301
We have stories to share, puppets to see, friends to meet, songs to sing, and video of Roger's work.
Just heard from Sean Johnson (aka Frosty) that Brian Henson and his live video puppetry troupe Puppet Up! are performing one nightly only, Sunday March 4th at the Grove in Anaheim, CA @ 8 PM.
Tickets are $33 each (plus exorbitant Ticketmaster fees > $10).
I've seen these folks at The Improv last year (and attended two of Victor Yerrid's and Patrick Bristow's puppet improv classes). They're awesome.
Beautiful silhouette animation. The technique certainly looks similar to Lotte Reiniger's cut-out animation work back in the 1920s, but a Wikipedia entry suggests this was done with computer. (I'm suspicious of that claim, given the time it was made). Anyways, YouTube does not do it justice -- the twilight effect is quite lovely particularly when projected in a theatre.
The director, Michel Ocelot, is the President of ASIFA-International, and also the director of a full-length animated feature called Azur and Asmar which just got bought by the Weinstein Company.
I first saw this short at a Spike & Mike Animation Festival years ago, but had not found it on any DVD compilation until now. You can find it (with 5 other shorts in this style) at Hong Kong Flix for about $12! Unfortunately, the extras are in French with only Korean subtitles.
Ahhh, Google. You keep impressing me. Now you have Geeks and Puppets coming together to demonstrate how the Gmail Email service can improve communications.
Previously, Gmail was invitation-only, but it has as of Valentine's Day, opened its doors to everyone. I highly recommend it over Yahoo! Mail Beta, a sluggish copy-cat. Although I have used Yahoo! Mail for years, the latest version is slowwwww and heavy if (like me) you have a decade worth of email. Gmail on the other hand, is nimble and has far better searching ability (it is Google, after all). I also like how its Chat client is built-in, unlike Yahoo which has a very heavy downloadable client with far too many features. Most of my friends are using Microsoft's MSN Messenger now (although the two are compatible) or Skype. A few are still using the ridiculous AOL AIM Instant Messenger. And fewer still are using the one that started them all, ICQ.
While we're on the subject, there are the Multi-IM clients, like the Mac-only Adium, the Open Source Miranda, and the popular Trillian.
All of these formerly smallish utilities are growing up to be mini-browsers; browsers are growing to become large applications. The eco-system on my desktop is getting a bit unruly! But I suppose that's the price to pay for a good competitive landscape. Otherwise, everything would be Microsoft.
Debuting in 1957, THE DOUBTFUL GUEST is the story of an inexplicable creature that shows up unannounced and unwelcome at a family-owned bed & breakfast. Brad Peyton (EVELYN: THE CUTEST EVIL DEAD GIRL) is attached to direct and Matthew Huffman will write the screenplay.
This could be cool, but once again, adapting a teeny tiny children's book into a full-length motion picture is frought with peril.
The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information is pleased to announce:
FLATLAND: A Romance of Many Dimensions A Miniature Opera by Randall Wong Performed by Dina Emerson and Randall Wong
Adapted from Edwin Abbott's celebrated 1884 geometric novel, FLATLAND is a miniature opera about the multiplicity of dimensions and the discovery of what exists beyond the seen. Flatland is a two dimensional world peopled by geometric shapes -- points, lines, squares, and circles -- who learn that the universe consists of more than their single plane. In the tradition of the Victorian Toy Theater, the opera is staged upon a large tabletop, giving the effect of a performance viewed through the wrong end of a telescope. FLATLAND, composed and co-performed by esteemed male soprano Randall Wong, juxtaposes the grand and the microscopically absurd, and collides Victorian stagecraft and illusion with modern toys and technology.
Friday, January 26th: 8 p.m. Saturday, January 27th: 3 p.m. & 8 p.m. Sunday, January 28th: 3 p.m. & 7 p.m.
Nota Bene: FLATLAND will be staged in the Tula Tearoom. Due to the unique restrictions of the space, we shall not be able to seat latecomers once the performances have started.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology 9341 Venice Boulevard Culver City, CA 90232
$15 General admission $10 Museum members, students, seniors, active service personnel
Please address queries & reservation requests to events (at) mjt.org
My friends over at Swazzle have started a video podcast for the Holidays, called Frosty & Steve, featuring our favorite snowman and his sidekick snowball. Each episode counts down the twelve days of Christmas with a special guest.
I really like the snowy textures on the characters! See how they made the puppets on Sean's blog, puppet101.
It appears there may be an inexpensive motion capture technology on the horizon (2007). From the specs, it is superior to the Nintendo Wii remote, as it uses ultrasound to detect exact 3-D positions at high speeds, and supposedly it gathers shape information about whatever you've attached the sensor to. They claim this could be used for collision detection and physics.
Also, it's platform-neutral, connects via USB, and will cost about $56.
One could build any number of puppetry controls with it! Virtual rod-puppets, marionette-controllers, shadow puppets. One could even attach it to actual puppets, driving virtual versions on screen.
If you are in Los Angeles, check out the premiere of Gretchen, a comedy/horror short about a couple torn asunder by "the greatest pancake ever." It's part of the Valley Film Festival on Friday September 15th @ 10 PM.
It was directed by Geoffrey Stebbins. Puppets built by Sam Hale, Jessica Stebbins and yours truly. Puppeteering by me also.
I don't want to give away anything, but I will say it was great fun to do! More production details coming soon.
Man, I bet this street marionettist (from Barcelona, apparently) has never had an audience this big before. And right there on the front page, a link to Yahoo! Directory: Puppetry.
The comments on the video are all enthusiastic. So many people have never seen a decent live puppet show before. Thank you, Internet!
Now if we could just get some footage of master puppeteers on the front page of Yahoo! Then we're talking. How about it, Hugo & Ines? Bob Hartmann? Phil Huber? Albrecht Roser? Let's get your work online if its not already.
My friends Sean & Patrick from Swazzle have been attending a very special improv class at the Henson lot, taught by The Groundlings, and Muppeteer Victor Yerrid. (Patrick invited me to participate in two of the "beginner" classes) This past week, they (and the whole troupe including Brian Henson) performed at the Hollywood Improv.
I had been there a few years ago to see some of the cast of Whose Line Is It Anyway? (Ryan Stiles, Drew Carey). This was similar, though with small flat-screen monitors everywhere for the puppeteers to use while performing, and large ones for the audience. There's definitely an added level of hilarity when you add puppets -- people laugh as soon as, say, a crab and an aardvark, or a valley girl and three aliens, appear on the screen. Not that Ryan Stiles or Colin Mochrie couldn't inspire outbursts of laughter with their physical and vocal mimicry, but seeing them as stylized puppets takes it to another level. For most people, puppetry is a novelty and video puppetry (ala Muppetry) even more so.
This went above-and-beyond just puppets and "adult situations" though. Anybody can swear and move a puppet around. These performers can act, switch characters on the fly, and make you believe that a bunch of foam dolls are really living things. The results were extremely funny. Tyler Bunch made up an hysterically dumb super-hero (at a homeless shelter) on the spot. Julianne Beuscher, the lone female performer, killed with everyone of her characters, whether a valley girl in post-Apocalyptic Australia, a Philippino girl suffering from overly tight panties, or a mouse torn between her beaver lover and a dream of cutting nosehair (he finds it hurts too much). Victor Yerrid and a Middle Eastern-sounding aardvark wanting to get his "ears" enlarged. Both Sean and Patrick held their own as nerdy guys, Haliburton phone operating rabbits, boardgaming crabs, and inconsiderate alien neighbors. There were no bombs in either show Saturday night, which I thought was amazing.
In July, the Puppet Up! folks plan to do this again as a live taping. Part of the troupe is off to Edinburgh to perform in a festival. Who knows? This could end up as a TV show (preferably on cable)
You know how I've been wanting a cheap but accurate controller for manipulating virtual puppets on either a PC or a videogame console. Ever since the Nintendo N64 offered 3-D graphics on par with a circa-1994 Silicon Graphics machine, this seemed inevitable, though that was 10 years ago.
But soon, with the Nintendo Revolution Wii™ and it's 6-degree of freedom, wireless remote, capable of tracking rotation AND position, Internet connectivity, and fairly good (though not the most impressive) 3-D graphics engine, the time has come! This thing could make a great virtual rod control. Imagine four of these per box, which would be connected to other performers on the Net, performing in the same scene, or watching and providing virtual applause!
Come on! Who's with me? The development kit is only $2000 (compared to the $20,000 Sony Pla
