Development : Harnesses and puppet performance

After finding performance with the puppets a little tricky and also painful to a degree me and Mark even came up with the idea of trying to make harnesses to tackle this. We got some old pipes and bits and bobs to create some type of harness that could attach to our bodies. This type of idea actually came from seeing some images of Jim Henson with a type of harness to help him hold up Kermit.

Mark's friend lent him a couple of puppets they use to perform with and we tried out some of the pipes inside of the puppets to see how they felt and for comfort. It was a little more tricky to create some belts for us to attach the pipes to. Sadly more for me because of my smaller frame a lot of the belts would fall to my feet and we had to tighten them with clips.

We did try some tests with the harnesses in class and filmed them.

We found throughout this though that we could perform really well without the harnesses and that it seemed to be a case if we were having a good day of performing. Despite this I had a little look around to see if there was any information into how to perform with puppets. I found a site that was made for puppeteers by puppeteers with useful tips and tricks of how to perform.

Puppet site

It was through this that I found out that some of the trouble me and Mark were having with performing was not so uncommon. Such as our puppets sinking down and finding it difficult to open the puppets mouths correctly.

Some advice includes :

The Human Arm and Hands
Human arm puppets are good to use and see, but the audience shouldn’t see an actual human arm or hand. If you raise your puppet too high, the audience can see its bottom edge and your arm which ruins the illusion of lifelikeness that you want to maintain. When using the arm rods, be careful that you don’t raise your hand over the top of the theater. When adult members of the audience see an arm or hand, they’ll politely overlook it, but you can’t count on that with children. If one sees it, you can safely assume that they’ll point it out to their friends next to them and will miss out on what the puppet is saying at that point.

During practices continue to focus on what each puppeteer should do to maintain quality in your programs, but don’t overlook these three things they shouldn’t do.

The Dreaded Quicksand Patches  
We recently began training some new puppeteers and one of the first things they realized was that it takes work to keep a puppet up in the air for 3 or 4 minutes. Their arms were sore after their first 3 minute routine and even more so after the second and third. One of the keys during your practice time is to work on conditioning the puppeteer’s arms so they can hold them at a consistent height for several minutes at a time. The second key is to make sure they concentrate on their puppet as much as possible. If these two keys are missing, you’ll run into quicksand patches in your theater where the puppet slowly sinks until just the top of the head is showing.

If the puppeteer’s arm tires quickly they’ll begin to lose focus on the puppet and just try to make it through the presentation. Without the right concentration, they begin to relax their arm which causes the puppet to sink. When that happens, the audience begins to wonder how far down it’ll go or they’ll silently urge it to come back up. Either way, they’re focused on a puppet and not the message.

If you find yourself in this situation, don’t just pop the puppet up because that’ll draw attention to it. Slowly raise it up to the proper height and continue the play.

I also did find some YouTube videos that could also help out with some of the trouble which became pretty useful especially in how to make our puppets talk.

In general it does seem that most likely that you sometimes just need to suck it up and try your best to not make mistakes. Especially since it is the puppets who will be on camera and not ourselves unless we do a live performance. We will have to practice a lot more and to get it just right and will probably have to get a extra body in to help us film to let us know when were in frame and we are showing beside the puppets.

Development : Audio, tutorial and film test

After further discussions and listening back on all our recorded material there was some conversations me and Mark had did about coping with depression and everyday things. We found our depression conversations to be usually only between ourselves since it was quite personal and something that we both share and struggle with. Our conversations ended up being also quite raw and honest with emotion when discussing the sensitive subject of mental illness.

We decided this could be the theme for our puppets audio of the skits and for them to talk about on screen. We had a open tutorial with Gair to discuss this further and he quite like the idea of our puppets being presented in this way. That the contrast of using bright fun looking characters talking about dark subject matters as well as being able to use the puppets to say and act things we may be shy or embarrassed to talk about.

We are staying open to other theme's for our short puppet episodes to also be light hearted and fun but we will have to try them out first to see how they go.

Importing the conversations into audacity I edited them down into 1½  and 2 minute tracks at most so our film's can be quite short as well. This is so we can make several different skits on the same topic as well not tire our arms out puppteering at the same time with minimal editing to do after wards. I had to listen and then cut out certain parts of the conversation to tidy them up by zooming in very closely to the wave lengths this could be such a background noise door's opening and closing, clothes rustling as well as unnecessary dialogue.

I've also reduced noise and added effects that make the puppets sound like they are in bigger rooms, behind glass and also outside with the reverb tool. Foley noises have been recorded by ourselves and also samples have been taken from https://www.freesound.org/ which is a free source sound site where people can share and upload anything sound related and share it. I would layer them up with different tracks to see how they sounded with the spoken audio or our voices before transferring them over to Mark.

The sound files were always been saved as M4A files but I found a really easy to use online audio converter that could change them into most audio formats for editing. It came in pretty handy for putting the files into Audacity as it had some trouble trying to work with the M4A files. But converting them to WAV and MP3's was easy enough when exporting them.
I also had to make sure all the tracks were at 12 DB to be imported into Premiere Pro using the amplify tool which can reduce and raise sound volume.

http://online-audio-converter.com/

We have been recording a lot of our conversations on Mark's phone which is pretty good quality but also have been using an Edirol. They pick up a lot more background sound which is a little tricky to edit but good quality. 

We think for the time being anyway we will only be using the raw sound of our conversations without any other sound effect's done in the sort of style of interview's or new's reports. We enjoyed this aspect because our conversation's quality is non scripted or fake talking about Depression and how it effect's our lives. It has made it more empathetic to the listener and we have found more engaging for an audience as well as it being the puppet's speaking the audio.

We also had not come up with the idea to use our conversations over the top of the puppets at first so our discussion's are not acting and are pretty genuine in presentation. Which is why it seems to work very successfully and we hope if we record any new material it will not effect the other performances.

To show this idea lot better been looking into creature comforts as an example which shows what were trying to achieve very successfully.

Creature Comforts is a franchise originating in a 1989 British humorous animated short film of the same name. The film describes how animals feel about living in a zoo, featuring the voices of the British public "spoken" by the animals. It was created by Nick Park and Aardman Animations. The film later became the basis of a series of television advertisements for the UK Electricity Board, and in 2003 a television series in the same style was released. An American version of the series was also made.

The original Creature Comforts short film was five minutes long and was conceived and directed by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations featuring the voices of British non-actors in the same vein as the "man on the street" Vox Pop interviews. It was produced as part of a series called Lip Synch for Channel 4. The film won Nick Park the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1990.

The film shows various animals in a zoo being interviewed about their living conditions. These include a depressed Gorilla, a Brazilian Puma and a young Hippopotamus who complain about the cold weather, the poor quality of their enclosures and the lack of space and freedom. By contrast, aBush-Baby and an Armadillo praise their enclosures for the comfort and security they bring, and a family of Polar Bears talk about both the advantages and disadvantages of zoos for the welfare of animals. Rather than the subject being one-sided or biased towards one view-point, there is a strong balance of opinions in the film, with some interviewees who are happy with their living situation, some who are not, and some who have a neutral opinion.

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The voices of each character were performed by residents of both a housing estate and an old people's home. Stop-Motion animation was then used to animate each character, and the answers given in the interviews were put in the context of zoo animals. The Polar Bears were voiced by a family who owned a local shop, while the Mountain Lion was voiced by a Brazilian student who was living in the UK, but missed his home country.

(I've been doing something that looks like this with the audio but not as advanced to put mouth shapes to each word or phrase and well be putting it to puppets.)

Influences

The Creature Comforts advertisements were produced in the period 1990 to 1992 and in some ways they were indicative of the shape of things to come in British television advertising. Many commentators believe that there was a fundamental shift in television advertising from the unbridled consumerism and egoism of the 1980s to what is sometimes termed a more "caring" approach in the 1990s. The Creature Comforts advertisements are cited as an early example of this phenomenon.

The format of the Creature Comforts advertisements was so successful that it was replicated in other campaigns in the following decades. In later years, however, members of the public became increasingly conscious of the potential uses of their vox pop interviews. This made it difficult to recapture the spontaneity and innocence of the early Creature Comforts advertisements. Although lookalike animations became relatively commonplace in television advertisements, they were usually scripted and rarely possessed the painstaking attention to detail of the original advertisements.

Thought this was a good example of putting raw audio to film just to show that it has been done in a sense but were going to do it in our own way.

So we booked out the sound studio one day and decided to do a test run with some audio and seeing how the puppets looked on film.

For the project I've been put in charge of all our audio and editing it while Mark is happy to edit our film footage but of course with each other's overall input. I've also been doing all the documentation through photographs throughout the project while Mark has been doing more technical aspects such as the film camera's and eventually editing.

We filmed our test with Mark's HDC-SD90 and we used the 300w Fresnels lights with filters.

It was a little tricky to set up equipment especially lighting in the recording room since it was quite small and to fit us in to perform with the puppets also. We also tried a more lowtek camera since it was just a test for performance and audio but also framing and how well we couldn't be seen off camera. To make the puppets mime to the correct audio we just played the audio on my laptop next to us and timed it right when each puppet had to speak.




We will take this further and see if we can do some more skits in this manner and also try a higher quality camera and better lighting. We also found performance to be a little tricky as well for physical limitations which we will look into.

Development : Building a new Deborah puppet with some Mark puppet

After some practice and making my little puppet head decided I wanted to recreate my puppet into a nicer looking one and a bit bigger.

So started the process again with using sponge to shape and make the head but with better defining shape and making it more like a human shaped head.

Since this is meant to be a female puppet I wanted to try to add some subtle features to the shape to make it look more feminine compared to Mark's male one. So I added little bits of sponge to make cheek bones.

I had some trouble with trying to decide material to suite my hair style and ended up deciding on a wig instead so I could trim and style the the hair similar to my own.

Then started to hot glue on some fleece for the skin and used a slightly lighter pink colour to make it more feminine and to play around with colour in puppets. Cause a lot of puppets usually can get away with really bizarre colours especially for skin tones.

I also had to make some eyes and not liking making the previous eyes so detailed with pupil and white around them decided to make some simple eyes out of Fimo. You bake this clay in the oven for a while which also gave time for the glue to settle on my puppet head.

I then started to work on the mouth of the puppet which was made with a rubber oven mitt which proved to be kinda tricky to place fabric on. Since it was rubber it moved around so much because it was flexible and empty but eventually got there by sewing through the rubber. The inside of the red mouth was made of felt.

For the eyes I then painted them with acrylic green paint to match my eyes colour to add a more cartoon female effect added fake eyelashes onto them with some glue. Used some UHU glue which can be great for crafting most materials and fixing things in your house.

I did some quick tests in Photoshop to help place the eyes on the puppets face before finally gluing them on for good. The wig also just pulled over the shape of the head like an actual wig would do on a human so it just sits snugly on the puppet which leaves possibilities for changing hair styles. Also used my glasses to help adjust where eye's would be.

I then added a neck with some more fleece onto the head with the hot glue gun.

Next was the body and was basing the body off of something that's recognisable for me as a person which is a hoodie I've been wearing around the art school a lot. Mark's puppet also has a hoodie body based on the University of Dundee official hoodie. He tried out some life size clothes at first and to try out body structures. He even did try out some chicken wire to create a type of rib cage to put under the clothes. I suggested using some sponge and just shaping it like the head and using a coat hanger for some help as well.

We have been using kids clothes as an alternative since adult clothes are a lot bigger. To make a template I got a real picture of my fox hoodie and took it into Photoshop to be able to make the fox picture.

This was to practice and have something to use as a guide before using materials to create or paint the fox logo onto the hoodie.

To also start making a shape for the body I got more sponge and some plastic bottles to create shoulders/chest and some shapes for the arms.

A coat hanger helped with some adjustments for shoulder width but it ended up needing more adjustment and trimming down the sponge for the final shape in the end.

The hot glue gun was also used to put it all together and some more sponge to help shape and fill out the sides of the body for more definition. Also had to shape it in a way that I could have space to reach my hand up inside and up into the head. To make the Fox logo felt was then used to make each layer based on it's color and the template was used to help shape each layer.

More hot glue gun to the rescue to put it all gently together and also to stick on the logo to the hoodie as well as stick inside the sponge for the body.

I think it worked out positive for the body all that's left to do is some tweeking of the shape and get the neck attached to the hoodie. I got help from Mark with the structure of the inside of the puppet and he had a go at using transfer paper to put the logo on his hoodie. As well as making limb structures for the arms and attempt's at making legs if we went that far.

Me and Mark will also consider about making hands as the next stage of building the puppets but we don't want to overdo them keeping the charm and simplicity. We will try to do some practice with performing with the puppets and I'll be editing some sound pieces for us to explore and use for skits.