FX: CRE's Puppet film

Part 1: Who was Mrs. Charlie Clews?

My third puppet film for This Big World is based on the strangely sparse, 50-year diary kept by a Mrs. Charlie Clews of Amulet/Pangman Saskatchewan 1935 - 1987. The book can be found at the Regina Public Library's Prairie History Room, bound under the title "Pangman and Amulet's Past," transcribed by 'F. Sample' (who I believe must be the same person as 'Frances Sample' who is mentioned in various archival documents from the area).

Consisting of photocopied typewritten pages bound in hardcover, the book contains no no images or illustrations, although the first few pages sparsely scattered with hand-written notes and names jotted in blue ink. I find the book particularly notable for the complete lack of information on its author, its transcriber, or any other information related to its content, such as maps, area history, and so on, that one might expect to find in the prologue or epilogue of such a journal. Outside of the journal entries themselves, the only whisper of the book's raison d'etre is this short note of introduction:

Following this is 150 some  pages of what Eric Kanius (creative team member) likened to early 20th century Twitter entries. Events deemed noteworthy by Mrs. Clews did not occur daily; in fact often there are only one or two entries per month. Sometimes entries consist of only a word or two, such as "Flies bad." or  "Crows." or "Canned peas." Sometimes the entries are strangely poetic, such as:

September 1944

1 -  Ethel and I saw a badger digging a hole in the summerfallow.

And sometimes I find the juxtaposition of the entries somehow startling:

April 1945
 4   -  A shower for Margaret Webb.
12   -  President Roosevelt died this afternoon. Chas sent part
        of the cream separator away to be tinned, so using the
        old one.
15   -  Harry looking for horses, but didn't find them.
19   -  C. disked some sloughs this morning and put out gopher
        poison this afternoon.
22   -  Russians fighting in Berlin streets.
23   -  C. located one horse at Dewey Morgan's farm.

The flow of time passing through Mrs. Clews' diary is remarkable for what she found interesting enough to note, as well as for what she leaves out, what is left to the imagination. Rarely does she use adjectives or descriptive words. I am fascinated by the enigma of the whole thing. Who is she? Why did she keep a journal that is so ineffable and so sparse? For whom did she write? And why did F. Sample deem it a worthy endeavour to transcribe, type, copy, and publish the diary...? For me the entire thing is astonishing, compelling.

And it is only one of hundreds of unique publications and personal histories that may be found in the Regina Public Library Prairie History Room, which contains only a small sample of Saskatchewan's extant first person narratives. I can barely handle the notion of the number of comparable life-journals within this one province alone, and cannot even bring myself to consider the millions of comparable documents of first person narratives both discovered and undiscovered that weave back through the dusky web of human history. I am still trying to figure out what it is about such documents that leaves me strangely shaken, churning with competing laughter, tears, wonder and longing -- particularly when the diary itself is probably actually entirely unremarkable.

I particularly like Mrs. Clews' entries for March 1938 at the bottom of page 12 (below).

History itself gives me a bottomless archeological hunger, and historical personal narratives fill me with a sense of terrible loss and that horrible insatiable sense of yearning that accompanies any unsolvable mystery; I am unsettled by the lack of facts, by history belonging to the teller, by the simultaneous dismissal and admission of mortality inherent in such accounts, by the residual stories of a life, and how strange it is that such narratives are capable of evolving even as they outlive their protagonists, the lifespan of the life-story of course depending on the resonance of the narratives with subsequent audiences.

There is something ineffable about this diary, and its publication in hardcover, and the unsettling and overwhelmed feeling I get from reading the entries that I want to explore with my third puppetfilm. I admittedly feel exploitative, appropriative, like a voyeur of the life of a dead stranger, and yet I feel gentle, I honour her loyalty to her audience, I love her for writing, for how she documented the passing of her days. I enjoy her.

1. Factual Evidence:  I have uncovered very little information about Mrs. Charlie Clews other than what is contained in her diary, which begins with her Silver Wedding Anniversary in 1937. On December 3rd, 1912, she married Charles Clews, who had immigrated to Saskatchewan from Birmingham, England in 1904 with his brother Will. The two brothers had settled south of Pangman, SK, on adjacent quarters of land, and 'batched' together until they married. The ensuing family tree of Will Clews is recorded by his grandson Wayne in a community history book from the area, but there is no mention of Charlie Clews or his wife, their family, or anything else about them that I have discovered as yet.

2. Clues to Character:  it is difficult to ascertain much about the writer's emotional character from her diary, so much of it being spare notation of events she considers important to record, from the price of eggs to unemotional entries linking dates and events, including various plantings, weather patterns, purchases, sales, births, deaths, marriages, illnesses, parties, arrivals, departures, and dismemberments in the neighbourhood; in addition, without nostalgia, she regularly notes the days when she sees sundogs and/or moondogs, and records the dates, if not her personal experiences of, astrological events such as comets and eclipses. As time moves on through the diary, the audience is moved along and oriented in linear time by occasional references to world affairs, the most frequent of these being local -- as well as international -- events surrounding the Second World War.

However, by the end of the diary, having been immersed in her world, particularly what  she recorded, as well as how she worded her entries, a character begins to form in my mind of a somewhat repressed middle-aged woman: dutiful, community-minded, hard-working, unromantic, self-sacrificing, perhaps somewhat stern, but above criticism due to her ability to embrace and embody the "right" way of living, as dictated by the local agrarian culture of the homestead-based wheat-built world of Amulet and Pangman, Saskatchewan, in the first half of the 20th century.

It is with surprise, then, that I found this entry in Mrs. Charlie Clews' diary:

July 1948

11 - The Four Gentlemen sang "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen,"
     my request.

There is no hint as to who "The Four Gentlemen" are, but I looked up the song and found that it was penned in 1875. It is filled with longing and romance, the lyrics suggesting a story of a man who promises to take his beloved back home across the sea, back to Ireland, because she is so sad in her adoptive new country (presumably the New World) that even the colour in her cheeks is beginning to fade.

I did find a creative commons use version of the song recorded by Victor Records in 1914, featuring baritone Clarence Whitehill at archives.org. This is lovely and scratchy and romantic and heartbreaking... and I plan to use it in the film somehow. Click on the video below to listen...

So perhaps Mrs. Charlie Clews did have a hidden blossom of romance tucked away within a softness somewhere inside of her, some fragile place shielded in her bosom, hidden under sensible thick cotton layers of diligence and practicality. Perhaps she mentioned moondogs, not only because of their significance in terms of her farmer husband's anxious relationship with weather, but because she loved those sparking midnight frostbitten rainbows that embraced the moon on the coldest, clearest nights. Perhaps she sang songs of longing, songs like "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen," while she canned peas and gathered eggs and washed clothes and separated the milk from the cream. And perhaps she spent a few stolen moments writing the flowering verses she so carefully kept out of her diary, the poems of her heart, the passions of her dreaming, the shadows and lights of her true self. The sighs between the lines.

Or so I dream her, so I dream my Mrs. Charlie Clews.

Part 2: How to make this film?

Since the focus of this seminar is special effects of different kinds, Eric and I spent the first week of preproduction exploring some approaches to digital effects possible through various types of post-production chroma-keying. We started by shooting a few tests with puppets and props already lying around the Underground PuppetFilm Works.

I like to start with thinking about what is possible within the confines of the medium at hand, so tests are the next logical thing for me to start looking at.
First we just played around with a few on-hand puppets and props in front of the mini green-screen, including this baby puppet I made years ago, who is a great example of how NOT to make a puppet for greenscreen. The lace edging her hat causes a lot of problems in chroma keying. Make sure your puppets and props don't have fuzzy edges if you want a good strong chroma key edge for green screen compositing.

And here she is dancing in front of  ... what else... a strip club. Eric downloaded the still from somewhere and composited the baby in front of it.

This Half-Rabbit creature was worth shooting, as I wanted to find out how tough it would be to remove non-green strings.

It's definitely harder than just replacing white strings with green strings. This is a quick test Eric did with creating a shadow of the Half-Rabbit using a second layer in After Effects, and comping both layers into a still of a desert. For a final version of this shot we'd want a little more tweaking on the keying, and a better option for the strings, but considering Eric did this in about 1/2 an hour, it's pretty cool, and very promising...

I also wanted to play with this fanciful  oil-on-plywood prairie landscape  that I painted early in the week...

so Eric set up a quick down-and-dirty 'track' with a few dowels and a 2x4 that he found in the PuppetWorks and shot a test tracking shot of a miniature house built by Emily Berntson for my other puppetfilm (still in production) last semester. If this were the final shoot, we'd need something a little less bumpy, but for our test this worked fine:

After a few passes, Eric created this nice and strangely creepy composite that simulates driving past an abandoned homestead house in a slightly surreal sepia landscape. This got me excited; in spite of the bumpiness of the tracked house, and the fact that it is going a bit too fast through the landscape, even taking parallax into account, I see this kind of compositing work with puppets as having infinite possibilities.

We also played with the miniature barn on a lazy susan in front of green screen to see how well we could approximate a tornado. If this were a final shot, it would be preferable if the lazy susan were green and the barn less shiny. There are other things that could be improved as well. 

I don't think we're in Kansas anymore... Eric sneaks our barn into a famous movie tornado...

We also wanted to try working with some basic shadow puppets, so we set up the overhead projector and newsprint screen, and played with an old shadow puppet from an earlier shoot, distorting the image with some of Berny's warped glass tricks:

Eric played with removing the white background, compositing the image onto a still of a wall he found online, and adding a few effects.