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 : sketches, first tutorial and early tests

From our idea about the two small and tall characters we discussed this quite a lot and ended up doing a lot of notes and examples of the two characters. How these two characters could compliment each other despite the contrast like other well known duos. We also watched some making of videos/DVD's of puppets mostly inspired from stop motion and ways to film a performance. As well as a type of plan of tasks which would could try to achieve in the next couple of weeks.

For some inspiration we were thinking of having our characters like living breathing being's such as the power of puppetry bringing objects to life. I really enjoy character design such as this and looked a lot into the art work of the video games of the 'Oddworld' series. They always design there characters from a biological type of view point if they lived in another world and had animal characteristics. Much like the puppets in 'The Dark Crystal' which I felt was strong if we were going down that route.

I even did some simple character designs of the tall and small how we thought our characters could look like since it is early stages.

Here's us even having a chat about different types of fairy tales of our characters and fables based around the idea of puppet scale and how we would create them. Another idea that we would probably like to make in the future if not for this project. (Character drawings drawn by Deborah)

Eventually we had so many ideas and different types of stories, characters and plots that it all got very over whelming. We sort of hit a brick wall for a while but this was near the time of getting a tutorial with Ellie. We explained our ideas and concept and that we were considering making normal hand puppets instead since the pressure and time constraints of stop motion/animatronics was to much.
As well as all our ideas and characters we thought about doing films about. On the side for a laugh we kept talking about how funny it would be to make puppets of our selves. And Ellie thought this was a great idea and suggested we just make the project about ourselves instead of all these weird characters and creatures.

Some sketches I did for cartoony looking puppets.

This was a very positive tutorial and let me and Mark feel a lot better of the direction of the project. So we decided to do some tests with different materials to make some simple puppets.

To our horror and hilarity Mark started to cut up the Mickey Mouse toy to see how it was made from the inside with the intention of making it into a person. Instead he destroyed Mickey Mouse and ended up sitting with his decapitated head for a couple of hours not really sure where to go from there.

It was pretty funny and made some type of progress with it considering it let us see how he was made on the inside. I made a paper puppet in the mean time to just try out some stuff with limb joints and for something simple of myself. Then eventually a simple paper one that's mouth can move with wires and pins in a simple style.

I also made a simple type puppet out of plastic bottle ends, cardboard and taping them together then I could put my hand inside and make a simple talking mouth.

This is just early stages at this point till we both try a bit more with materials such as fabric or ways to shape a bigger moving puppet head. We will continue this process and see if we can create some puppet heads that look like ourselves.