Starting idea's discussion and interests for inspiration

Me (Deborah Chapman) and Mark McGreehin have decided to do a collaboration project this semester involving us making puppets in some form and documenting our work process and performance.

I've been given the task of blogging the project and updating with our process in some digital manner through this blog which will have photography, audio and progress videos.
We decided to do this project after discovering that an interest we have in common is making things especially puppets after growing up as 80's and 90's kids. We always found our selves quoting 'Labyrinth' and 'Dark Crystal' which were favourites of ours and having a love for toys and figures as well as Children's shows.
We then got talking about making a puppets and then a puppet film together which is what this blog will be about.

To start off we we've had a few sessions of just talking about ideas and bouncing off of each other for inspiration as well as what sort of puppets we might like to make. Our discussion's also tried to include some sort of narrative for a type of character as a starting point.

We started to talk about the idea of a type of fairytale or a fable type of storyline where a character or a couple of them might learn some time of lesson or has some type of message. For the first ideas we ended up coming up with a couple of characters that are small and tall. That the contrast would be quite strong visually and that they in turn help each other in some way and learn to accept their differences or help. It did end up sparking lots of situation ideas and narratives for these characters which was really promising.

But we knew that we would need to start researching a lot more to begin to understand how and what ways we could make puppets and what type of puppets are out there. Mark enjoys looking at the project from a more technical aspect such as animatronics and inspiration from Jurassic Park and Yoda as inspiration. Which involve these type of materials such as latex/rubber made puppets with animatronic heads to make expressions and talking. I've not had much experience making puppets but am willing to try out this method if possible and tests of other materials to create them.

We will have to discuss this further and look into more research about what we can achieve as we are trying to make a 3-dimensional character. We are gathering books and DVD's from home and the Uni library as a starting point about puppetry and types of animation. I'll be trying my hand at some character designs and collecting research for a sketchbook.

We also have been documenting our conversations through audio and I've been put in charge of doing audio for the project. I've put together these little short videos with our conversations over the top of photography documenting our project's process.