Fabrication 02 - 2D puppetz at the Works!

Check out the fabrication party that swung the Works over the holidays! I'm a little behind on the blog, but that doesn't mean things haven't been crazy down at the Underground PuppetFilm Works...


Berny Hi: George Bassler's Perpetual Motion Machine

Berny came down the day after he slipped on the ice and cracked his head and got a concussion. His excuse for working on the world's tiniest shadow puppet test was that the doctor told him to do precision work that required spacial thinking and small motor movements.

I for one love the way this shadow test turned out... but apparently it's not supposed to be a baby swimming next to a cabin; it's supposed to be a boy fatally shot in a gun misfire accident from across the field (some of these prairie stories are a little tragic...). 

that's why we do tests!

Tyler Banadyga: Title TBA (something unexpected is discovered during the digging of the basement on the family farm)

And Tyler has been true to his word: once he decided on his story and approach, he became a puppet fabrication machine!! His story is awesome, and based on something that happened when his family was digging the basement for their new frame home while still living in the sod hut. He churned out a whole family and a homestead over the holidays.

digging puppet test!

I just love the orderly way Tyler lays everything out.

great down-shot of the guys lifting the rocks out of the new basement. 

Just before Christmas Tyler set up a mock-up test of his characters and the sod house, to get an idea of the size of the sky, foreground grass, and other elements he'll need to complete before shooting. It looked amazing through the camera, and what really blew me away was the complete success of his sod house. It's just ink and watercolor on paper, but it totally looks 3D through the lens.

Yep, it's really 2D!!

 

Awesome work, Tyler!

Amber Christensen: Title TBA (a nightmarish story about a mouse-infested schoolhouse and a schoolteacher)


I didn't get as many pictures of Amber this time around, but below is documentation of two of her many fabrication triumphs on her prairie history mouse-phobia nightmare puppetfilm:

  1. a glowing halo on Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, the patron saint of suriphobia who, according to Wikipedia, is also invoked against rats and mice in general, and:

   2. a ringing bell on her prairie schoolhouse!

NOTE: To fully appreciate the engineering required to achieve this effect, please see the following video:

 

Angela Edmunds: Title TBA (a female fox and a prairie chicken hen overcome species-bias and become friends over a long prairie winter)
Angela is working in a satellite studio, the Underground PuppetFilm Works Qu'Appelle Valley. I hear they've taken over another underground space out there and the work is rockin'! Here are a few photos from Angela's preproduction and fabrication, and she has also joined us a few times at the central studio. Her work is amazing, and she has some lovely puppets and images that we'll post next time, as I don't have the images yet. Watch the blog for more updates on her incredible project!

 

This is Angela's home studio where she is shooting an amazing puppetfilm -- we were treated to a few clips of the raw footage, and it is excellent. I am super stoked to see the rest!! 

chicken skeleton

a lovely 2D prairie chicken puppet!

Katrina Bray: Title TBA (Love, Saskatchewan, can be a pretty creepy place, as evidenced in this historical account of settlers encountering a poisoned timber wolf)

Kat has upped the ante on the work on her car fabrication and it's turning out to be pretty sweet. She used light sheet metal...

...with various gauges of steel wire for the trim, tires, and other details. 

She roughed up the finish with sandpaper and rubbed paint into the scored metal, giving it an awesome patina.

The wheels gave her a little trouble, but she soon figured that out (check on this video and see if you understand her dilemma).

Next Kat turned to the set -- it's coming along beautifully...

... and finally, the main character in the story: the wolf is getting his first go-round in the test department. Although he is just a simple paper test, don't you find this wolf remarkably appealing?

And just in case you wondered whether we have any bona fide Film Theory discussions down at the Underground PuppetFilm Works, here is a prime snippet of discourse comparing Genre Theory to Aesthetics of Cinema.

Kelly Anne Riess: Title TBA (inspired by the T-Rex Discovery Centre in Eastend, this shadow puppetfilm is based on the true story of a young T-Rex whose passion for jogging keeps him safe from predatory dinosaurs, but not from the meteor that kills them all)
Kelly got busy and busted out a ton of shadow puppet dinosaurs and prehistoric plants, and  was the first Puppetientist to wrap her shoot! Check the production blog to see some stills from her big shoot day. In the meantime, here are a few pics from the day she brought some of her puppets in to test them for size... I really love how the gel emphasizes the shadow puppets and brings them to life!

Berny Take 2: more experimenting...
After we got the 'shadow stage' up and running, Berny also did a few more tests. Even though he's recovered from his concussion, he is still insisting on shooting on Super8 Film rather than using the awesome hi-tech digital video cameras supplied by the Filmpool that most of the rest of us are using.

Berny's plan is to shoot using negative film, and then not have the lab reverse it when they process it, so what is black will be white and vice versa in the final film. It's gonna take some figuring, and I think it's going to look pretty sweet.


Chrystene Ells: It Was a Circus (based on a historical narrative from Hanley, Saskatchewan, concerning some drunk young men encountering a pig in a delicate situation on the prairie after dark)

I too spent much of the holidays at the PuppetWorks, cranking out a number of 2D puppets for my first film, It Was a Circus. Of course I started with some boards, very rough, but incredibly helpful when it came to fabrication.

With 2D puppets, every angle and camera placement means a new puppet.
Note to self: Next time, not so many angles. 

The sky and clouds were very interesting to me, so there was quite a bit of fussing with ways of making them work. The first mock-up simply used a blue plastic table cloth for the sky, but it wasn't giving any texture or filtering the backlight of the sunset the way I wanted, so although I was happy with the clouds, the sky needed some work.

Sarah and Amy ended up learning a lot about papier mache during their fabrication of the sky out of various shades of blue tissue paper. It turned out GREAT!!

Once backlit, there were lots of possibilities for colors to play on the sky. These photos (below) are a bit washed out, but after futzing around with diffusion, adding a reflector, flagging for glare, and adjusting the settings on the video camera, we were able to get a nice soft sunset wash across the horizon and reflected on the clouds. Even this mock-up didn't look too bad on the actual video camera.

I decided that the Pig and the Prairie are the two main characters, and in a way the humans are somehow incidental. This influenced my design decision to fire up the colours of the sky in sunset, and to give the pig a kind of stained glass look using gels and cardboard painted black, but to leave the men in pure black silhouette. Here are just a few images from the surprising number of puppets I ended up having to build to satisfy all of my shot requirements.

Who was the storyboarder on this shoot, anyway? That fool is fired. 

And a sample of final tests on movement for a couple of the puppets: a pig, and a man who is trying to catch him.

"...oink...?"

As for the rest of the puppetientists, many are working at home (Janine, Jessica R. and Jessica G.), and some are working in a top-secret department of the PuppetWorks (Dan), but I hope to have some stuff to show here soon from the others!


Next post: shooting!

Until next time...


Puppetz rule!