Monday, April 11

The Puppet Press - April News


Amanda Palmer visited the set when she was here in Australia, and got to meet our lovely heroine Cora.

Exciting New Developments
Press Kit
We have a press kit! It is fancy, and if you are a member of the press, or just someone who likes lots of information, you can download the press kit HERE.

Animation Research
We've been doing lots of research on animation techniques, reaching out to professional animators in the field and we have received some very exciting responses.

Jamie Caliri is an Emmy award winning animator responsible for several projects that have inspired us, including:  the title sequence for the Lemony Snicket film, several United airlines commercials using animate paper puppets, and the opening credits to 'The United States of Tara'.

Jamie generously offered to help answer any questions we had about the technical challenges of paper animations, and even put us in touch with the master paper puppet maker, Morgan Hay (who was an assistant art director on Coraline, among other things). Morgan has been helping us make our puppets stronger by sending us secret puppet diagrams. Soon we will rule the universe!


Paper puppets might look simple, but they're quite tricky to build. They have to be moveable and pose-able, but with parts that don't wilt, bend, or collapse - the Doctor's head has a tendency to fall off at the most inconvenient moments. So this week is puppet laboratory week! Inspired by Morgan's expert advice, we'll be printing out new puppets, trailing improved materials, and figuring out new ways to build them better and stronger.

In the not-so-exciting-but-still-necessary category of developments, we have bought hard drives for all the project data, upgraded RAM in the shooting laptop, and come up with workflow and production schedules. So many notebooks… Whee!

The Next Phase

First up will be a lot of time in Photoshop. We'll be taking scans of Molly's hand drawn art and using them to create the elements that make up a scene. These are then printed, cut out, and turned into the scenery.

To give you and idea of how much work this can be, here's an example of how we make a plant:

Molly draws some foliage.



We then duplicate and print a whole page of leaves.


Each one is carefully cut out...


...and glued together to make the complete plant!


The finished plant can be glimpsed in the background of our kickstarter trailer. Each element of the film is constructed in this way. There is a good chance we will go mad, and may need to get some crafty assistants to join us in our insanity... more on this soon.

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To wrap up our news bulletin, here is a stunning paper animation that Jamie Caliri and Morgan Hay worked on:



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