Development : Green Screen test

After creating some puppets to work with we decided to try out the green screen studio and see how they looked on film. We picked the green screen as well so we could edit the background since we weren't sure of what type of backgrounds we wanted to use. We set up the studio with lighting and set up the camera to do some simple shots.

Mark brought in a toy he altered for another project to do a another test with to see if we could end up using other types of puppets and effects in the long run. We attached rods with green screen tape on the ends and tried to do a walk cycle of the puppet. As well as recording clips of our puppets talking on camera and how just by simple camera tricks you can hide the performers (us).

It let us learn about how to become in sync with each other and working together especially working with puppets and doing a walk cycle with one. It's all about timing and communication through body language which takes a bit of getting use to since were putting it through a non living object. We will look into this further with some research and of course practice with our puppets.

We edited the footage in final cut pro and adobe after effects to get rid of the green screen and tried out some simple and silly effects.

Felt this simple film test worked out quite successfully and it gave us a good hands on approach to how long filming and editing will take us. This one didn't really take that long at all and were considering doing a few short skits with ours puppets with audio and possibly better backgrounds.

We will develop this process further and look into some more resources and I'll start to make a better looking puppet.

Development : Constructing puppets

We started to seek out some materials that could be cheap and easy to obtain to make puppets I looked at some tutorial's online. They showed how to make simple hand puppets with everyday house hold objects. There pretty straight forward and very useful on what materials to us and how to even make eyes. It seemed to be that felt/fleece was a great material for making them and using everyday sponge to construct the head shape or features.

We got some materials and spent a weekend trying to make some puppets sometimes it was a little tricky but we got the hand of the basic shape and way to move the mouth. We got some fleece, sponge, felt, oven mitts, fluffy scarf, plastic spoons and used sewing, pins and a hot glue gun to put it all together. It took us a while to get the hang of how the materials worked especially the sponge as we cut it up and chopped into it to get some shapes.

We made some heads Marks came out a lot better than mine so I will redo mine to suite his puppets style a bit better eventually. But it was a very fruitful test and it let us get to play around with the materials and see there pros and cons. It seemed that fleece works really well for stretching over the sponge and the over mitts work really well for using as a jaw. We will do some film tests with these guys and see how we get on with them.

Here's us having a chat about Jim Henson and how he created puppets and inspiration for creating our own.