#puppet production

[obscurewallflower]

Caught a show at the Center for Puppetry Arts, Xperimental Puppetry Theater aka XPT, during intermission they had a "multiverse-renowned mixologist" serving drinks.

XPT: Xperimental Puppetry Theater

Learn more about our XPT: Xperimental Puppetry Theater program today, including study guides, ticket prices, and showtimes.

[emilyanimation]

Practicing the Shadow Puppets

[emilyanimation]

Final Puppet Design and Practice

Deimante was the leader of the shadow puppet design portion of the project, and used her own style to create the different puppets that will be used for the shadow performance. She used a white paper for most of the puppets during act 1, as the emotions there are a lot softer and lighthearted and dark paper for the more darker subjects. Considering they will be used for shadows these differences won’t show up a large amount but they may still show up in slightly lighter/darker colours. 

She informed us that she created the puppets with an A4 scale in mind, so we attempted to test this with these sizes in mind on a wall. We quickly found that this was much too small to work on, as more than two people couldn’t easily move around in such a small space. It also would have been a good idea to have practiced on a screen instead of just a wall to get a sense of depth.

[emilyanimation]

Shadow Puppet’s Style

As I am on the team working on the sets, I don’t have as much research on the shadow puppets as others in my team might. However we have decided as a group that we are going to do a similar style of puppets as the ones in the Lior video, in that they will be controlled by sticks instead of any other method. Theres something of a quaint, homemade feeling to shadow puppets controlled by sticks, and the amount of movement they acheive is surprising and something we could like to apply to our own work. 

While not exactly similar to our projects work, I adore the pieces done by The Manual Cinema. During their performances, they act out everything on the bottom half of the stage, while the shadows of that performance are being projected above them. Everything from the characters to the backgrounds is a projection using shadows, and the live aspect is fascinating to me, I’ve never seen shadow puppets made quite like this. 

This work has somewhat inspired our own. While we are recording the shadow puppets so they won’t be live, the fact that they have two halves of the performance (both a 3D and 2D) is very similar to our own work.

[emilyanimation]

Puppet Development

Considering I was allocated to the team working on the sets, I haven’t been as active talking about the development of the puppet work.

We’re working with a combination of shadow puppets and 3D puppets, as the narrators of the story will be acting in the foreground in 3D, while what they’re talking about will be illustrated with shadow puppets in the background. 

For the 3D puppets we wanted to go for a style similar to Edwina Bridgemans work, as the kind of rough, textured but quaint look was what we wanted to go for. The characters themselves are loveable themselves despite being from a rough area which is what we wanted to get across in their designs.

Her work is also mostly constructed from found objects and has something of a childlike innocence to them, which can be an interesting subvertion of the topic of the Krays. Keeping stuff relatively dark but with the odd bit of humour and whimsy in the characters and set allows things to not stay too dark and gives everything a more naturally human atmosphere.