Development: Surprise we made one more puppet

We went ahead and decided to make one more puppet after getting the majority of our work done. We ended up doing this so we could have another puppet representing our puppet shorts with intro and outro's because it felt a bit bare aesthetically. And because we've had so much fun with this project and positive support all the way through we wanted to make another Puppet. 

We decided to make a puppet of our Tutor Gair as he's been organising a puppet workshop for over the summer for us with funding and has shown so much support and positive outlook on what were doing. We did have plans to make other tutors and people we know but because of time and because some people weren't comfortable with the idea also didn't want to offend anyone which isn't this projects intention at all. We will maybe make more after assessment for other tutors and friends a like.

Mark made a tiny clay mock up of Gair to get a sort of three dimensional guide before we continued to make the rest of the puppet.

We made him much the same way that our's were made with sponge, cardboard, rubber mouth piece, fleece and felt and put all together with a hot glue gun. The cardboard helped to shape the head better from the inside.

We did both take turns at creating the head but because of time restraints and other work to share between us Mark ended up finishing the Gair puppet while I worked on Gair's audio, blog, uploading YouTube videos, and sketchbook.

We decided to use some faux fur from a winter hat for Gair's hair it ended up being a great texture and best we could to represent his hair.

The next day we booked out the production studio for a few hours to film Gair and to get some photography opportunities of the puppets. The reason Gair is wearing a lab coat is because in the context of when we asked him for advice about if we needed some sort of warning for our project since it is about a serious subject matter. From the audio I created Gair mentions if someone did an introduction wearing a white lab coat in the view that people usually stop and listen to people announcing or introducing something of importance in this way. So from that the idea stuck that his puppet should be wearing one.

Someone left safety goggles in the production studio we borrowed them for our filming.

We set up the green screen area for the performance using the board to deflect the green from the felt of the puppet and used Mark little camera to film it.

I volunteered to perform as Gair to the audio tracks we created for an introduction and a outro of him.
We also used green screen  to keep our options open for a background to use for him and also because we sorta did this all as a secret from everyone.

I also took some shots of our puppets to use for further images for presentation and also to have some shots of them finished to present.

We also have found placing the puppets on lighting stands or microphone stands is a great way to present them and we managed to borrow some from a local church for assessment.

Now theirs a couple of weeks to let Mark edit and for me to finish off the blog, sketchbook, poster and dvd cover get everything ready for assessment.

Development : Lighting and filming with better equipment

We tried out the sound studio again after getting really great responses from our puppet test and it seemed that many people liked the puppets being behind the glass. This may be because it made the context of the conversation more like an interview scenario a suited the tone a lot better. So we tried again with some help from Louise Mccusker a TBA second year who is great to work with. She helped us record the new footage and helped us stay in frame and hidden on camera.

From some advice from Gair about lighting we tried a reflector and softer lighting since lighting effects fleece differently to human skin and gave off a different effect. We also tried some gels over the light to create a better balance.

Because lighting and reflections don't mix which is making filming a little more tricky we had to keep positioning the camera and lights in different ways. We tried to make sure the reflections of the camera equipment could not be seen and also Mark had to clean the glass as it was showing dirt and finger prints easily being picked up.

We also tried filming from different angles and also with the higher quality camera but it seemed that the lowtek camera gave us a much better result. But it turned out after reviewing the footage on a television we found that the quality was much better than viewing it on the Mac's in the studio. And that it was different from how it looked on camera when when we were filming. Which now let us learn that the lighting would be successful enough with the Panasonic PMW EX1.

We now needed to try out different conversations and have a look at different locations for each one.

Here's us chatting about the next steps.

Research: Gathering Source Material

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.