After doing some initial research on types of puppets and some examples we decided to have a look at some materials and look into the structure of puppets and them in motion. I went home for a weekend and gathered some research materials that I had collected over the years that I felt would give us some inspiration. Also the inner workings of how puppets can be made and how certain materials work for movement and performance.
This can be a little tricky as there is so many ways to make puppets and perform with them. I brought some DVD's that include some of the examples from the previous post and they have special features on them that show how the films and puppets were created.
I also brought some books that have the concept art and explanations behind the creation of the movies and puppets in depth which is good for reference. As well as character design for inspiration and story boarding for narrative and production design. I'm going to be doing concept's and characters designs with traditional media to help create two dimensional character into a three dimensional character.
Their is some scanned in pages below.
Obtained a magazine that is aimed at Doll Artists and features different types of Doll types and ways to create them thought it might be interesting for inspiration.
Being a fan of Tim Burton when I was growing up so had some figures based on the puppets of the film's and think they will help for reference. Since Jack's Puppet for the film had different head's with different expressions for animating Jack's face. The puppeteers behind the scenes made hundreds of Jack's head's and switch them over between takes allowing Jack to be able to speak and have expression's.
We also did have a look at some types of puppetry from the University Library and found some instructional videos and some books. One was that of How to create and animate a clay puppet by Mark Sawicki.
I tend to know about different kinds of puppet artists especially stop motion animation and there usually a lot darker in style and context which I find interesting. For example introduced Mark to the Brothers Quay and there surreal films and characters. This is an example of there work this certain one is a homage to the great Czech Artist Jan Svankmajer which I totally recommend into looking in.
Me and Mark also took a trip out to some charity shops to have a look at different toys and doll clothes to see about materials and structures as a hand's on approach. But also to try some tests on actual toys before we went into making them from scratch our selves. There was different kinds of toys and the ways they are made including fabric printing and also some parts made of plastic instead of fabric. The Disney store even had some puppet like toys including the Muppet's since we have been looking at the work of Jim Henson.
We ended up buying this Mickey Mouse teddy so we can do some tests on him much to our horror and delight at this prospect. We picked this toy because we were interested to see how the features were structured on the inside of the head and how they were shaped and formed.
We also took a trip to the University art store to have a look at different mediums we could possibly use for sculpting puppets if we ended up creating one that way. This was just to get an idea of what was available to us and what we could get a hold of if needed quickly.
We also went to Edinburgh to see War Horse and all the animals in the play were puppets controlled by various people. It was quite amazing to see and you end up forgetting about the puppeteers inside the puppets and focus more on the performance. This also helped in the way of seeing how puppets can be constructed and how they perform on stage with effects and people.
If you skip to 9.08 you can see the full finished puppet that was in the play.
With our time scale and and budget we understand we wouldn't be able to do as big a project as feature length or stop motion feature film. As much as we would love to and how much we love the art form but we will have to try a different kind of puppetry. But it's good we can gather as much resource and understanding of puppetry as an art form before we dive into deep.
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