Creature Symposium: Day Two!

[labricoleuse]

I am so, so sad for the symposium to be over! I'm genuinely sad that i am going to be finishing up my projects at home and not going to have a chance to see everyone else finish up theirs in person! (Though, there is a Facebook group for us all to share photos on, so at least there is a way to see pix of how they all turned out.)

But, i'm ahead of myself, since i still haven't written about the second or third days yet, so first i better do that.

The general schedule of the symposium consisted of morning presentations and demos on various related topics (how to use different materials and when, engineering and patterning issues, techniques and cautions, etc), with hands-on labs in the afternoons and evenings. On the second day, the lectures discussed the construction of body forms for bighead/walkaround/mascot costumes, and interior mechanisms for smaller scale puppetry.





Isn't this a great snail puppet?



Too bad he was damaged by being stored in a very hot vehicle on tour.



You can buy a half-size dress form, but OU makes theirs using this mold.



Kathryn Wagner and Kjersten Lester-Moratzka discuss how to pattern and construct pod bodies for walkaround/mascot creatures


Interior shot of a pod, showing numbering system of pattern pieces


Holly Cole shows how the joints move on a simple horse puppet



Brandon Kirkham shows the interior jaw mechanism on a hyena puppet



Three examples of blinking eyes, engineered by Brandon Kirkham



Brandon demonstrates some of the operation techniques using various mechanics



Two-person bat puppet, demonstrated by Brandon Kirkham and Nick
(who made the puppet, and whose last name i cannot find in any of the documentation)



David Russell discusses how to use mass-produced Halloween masks to sculpt Varaform on,
for maskmakers who might not feel confident in their blue-foam carving skills.



The stage is set for Day Two in the Varaform lab



Amy Page of UNC-Chapel Hill whips up a lion mask matrix in no time...



...while Tom Bernard of Cal Poly put together this great duck!



Meanwhile, i was ready to cast my rabbit-head i'd carved the day before.
Here he is, covered in foil with pattern piece lines marked and notched.



Pattern pieces, created by "draping" tissue paper onto the form and shaping it with packing and scotch tape



Varaformed rabbit head!


I was the first one in my group to finish, and i have to admit that i was kind of a douchebag about it, dancing around with my finished Varaform head and waving him in the air, singing, "I'm dooooone, i'm finished! This is what a finished bunny looks like!" Well, really only to Amy and Tom, who are friends and colleagues and who hopefully didn't want to smack me too hard. :D

I've got to pack up and check out of my hotel now, and head back to Carolina. I do have more photos from the rest of the symposium, so there will be at least one more post about it, as well as some forthcoming posts down the road of how i finish these projects up at home, painting and so forth.

And, if you're a member of USITT, i'm going to be co-authoring an article on it for Sightlines with Dixon Reynolds of SUNY-Fredonia, so look for that in a forthcoming edition!

Comments

curious

[(Anonymous)]

is a macro puppet simply one that does not fit on the hand, rather one that is controlled by arms/sticks/multiple people? do you know of the giant marionette performances in europe (i think a fisherman and little girl, and once there was an elephant i think). are those 'macro puppets' or because they are massive in size, they are another category?

Re: curious

[labricoleuse.livejournal.com]

You are correct, i use that term to refer to puppets that are larger than the scale of the puppeteer(s). We first started using it in 2000 (the word) to describe a giant dragon puppet that took up the entire stage of the ART in Boston, one person manipulated the head from inside it and two other people manipulated its limbs (like the carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors). It is a useful term to indicated a drastically different scale than, say, a half-scale marionette or a "muppet" style hand puppet.

And yes, those French macropuppet performances (The Sultan's Elephant i think?) are INCREDIBLE. I saw that they were building a new entire show a couple years ago? Cool stuff!