Dave Jones recently wrote in to share his amazing outdoor performance piece Highly Strung, which combined large scale puppetry and animated projections. The performance was staged outside of a grain silo with a 45’0 tall puppet that required 10 puppeteers to operate. It’s a really impressive piece of work; lots of pictures and info can be found on Dave’s blog.

A great (and rare) look at the men who build traditional water puppets in a small village in Northern Vietnam. This is from a documentary that Italian film student Alessandra Grassi is currently working on. She spent two months in Vietnam in 2011 and if this footage is any indication, her film is going to be really fascinating.

You can learn more about Vietnamese Watter Puppetry and follow along with the progress of her film on her blog Vietnam, Water and Puppets.

I really like this animated spot that John Kelly directed for Chipotle. It’s about a farm losing its way by because of industrialization…and then reverting back to a sustainable, happier path.

Have a behind-the-scenes look at the making of it:

Via Director’s Notes.

Mary Thornton, hard at work (as always) earlier this week at Famous PEOPLE Players (image source: The National Post)

I began my career as a professional puppeteer with Famous PEOPLE Players (FPP) a really acclaimed black light theatre company that’s toured around the world and performed on Broadway. I spent almost four years there in the late `90s and it was a really remarkable formative experience for me. It’s safe to say that not a single day goes by that I don’t make use of something that I learned while I was working there and the name of the woman who I learned a lot of that from is Mary Thornton.

Mary is the mother of FPP’s founder Diane Dupuy. Her life story is pretty incredible. She was born in Canada, but was classically trained in dressmaking, tailoring, and ceramics in Italy before returning to Canada, getting married, starting a family and opening a popular dressmaking shop in Hamilton (near Toronto), Ontario. She later became Wardrobe Mistress to the Hamilton Opera Company and when it was discovered at age 44 that she had a tremendous singing voice she studied Opera in New York before returning to the HOC to sing in operas like La Boheme, Carmen and Madame Butterfly.

That would be enough for most people, but Mary was just getting started.

When Mary’s daughter Diane founded the Famous PEOPLE Players in 1973, Mary devoted herself to the company full time and she’s been the head of the company’s Visual Effects Department (FPP’s puppet and prop shop) ever since. I have no idea how many puppets, props and costumes she actually designed and made over the years, but it numbers well in to the thousands; FPP’s puppet shop is easily one of the most prolific in the world. Mary’s work has been on Broadway, at Radio City Music Hall and graced stages around the world from Toronto to Tokyo and back again.

By the time I worked at FPP Mary was in her 80s and she was almost always the first person to arrive in the morning and the last to leave at night. According to yesterday’s National Post, it sounds like nothing has changed:

But sitting around is not for Mary Thornton. Neither is retirement. Not at 65. Not at 75, and not on Thursday, at 95-years-old, just a day shy of her 96th birthday on Friday.

We are sitting — although that is not often the case with Ms. Thornton — in her office at Famous People Players supper theatre, where you can find the nonagenarian six days and some 60 hours a week, one of Canada’s oldest working taxpayers.

You can read the full article here.

I have many fond memories of Mary, many of which involve the times when I would hang around the company’s puppet shop late at night after work. Mary would inevitably set me to work, folding napkins for the company’s restaurant or ironing laundry (I never got very good at ironing, but I can still fold one helluva napkin). I think my favourite memories of her though are the times when she would suddenly emerge from the wings on stage mid-rehearsal to chastise the cast for not handling props correctly, or tell one of us what we were doing wrong with a puppet. This was often to the annoyance of whoever was conducting rehearsal, but it really didn’t matter; in the end Mary is almost always right. To this day I have a long list of “Mary-isms” about building and performing puppets that I use all the time.

Mary is one of a kind and they’re not exaggerating when they call her a Canadian National Treasure. I have much better appreciation of art and performance because of her and she has been a huge influence on my work. There are dozens (if not hundreds) more people who have passed through the doors of FPP over the years who will tell you the same thing. I consider myself very lucky to have had the chance to learn from her about life, puppetry, ironing and even the proper (Italian) way to eat spaghetti.

I have no idea if you’ll ever see this or not, but Happy Birthday Mary.

If you want to learn more about Mary and Famous PEOPLE Players I highly recommend picking up one of Diane Dupuy’s books, Daring To Dream and Throw Your Heart Over The Fence, which detail a lot of the company’s history. Both of them may now be out of print, but you can often find used copies online or order directly from FPP).

Time Machine Guitar is a new aspiring TV series that describes itself as “like Mr. Rogers with a Stratocaster”. Created by Grammy nominated children’s singer Ralph Covert, the show is built around Ralph and his (wait for it) time machine guitar having time traveling musical adventures with a bunch of puppet friends. The cast includes some great puppeteers, Pam Arciero, Jim Kroupa and Ben Jones. The puppets for the currently-in-production pilot were built by Jonathan Little.

More videos and info about the project can be found at www.TimeMachineGuitar.com.

Puppetry is going to play a big role in this year’s Dragon*Con!

Dragon*Con (for those who aren’t familiar) is one of the largest and most exciting genre conventions in the world and is held annual in Atlanta, Georgia  over the Labor Day weekend. After experimenting with some puppetry content last year, the convention has decided to go all-in on puppets this year with a full blown puppetry track. This means they need 30+ hours of puppetry programming and the organizers want puppeteers and puppetry fans alike to get involved.

Dragon*con is currently accepting proposals for all elements of programming, including workshops, lectures, live performances (for kids as well as adults), fan panels, a puppet slam and just about anything else puppet related that you can think of. They’re also accepting volunteers to act as Puppetry Track Staff who will assist performers and guests. If you would like to learn more or get involved email Beau Brown at beau.brown@gmail.com for more details.

Dragon*con 2012 takes place Agust 31st through September 3rd in Atlanta, Georgia. Keep an eye on puppetry.dragoncon.org for upcoming annoucements.

Remember when Fox News accused The Muppets of being anti-oil? Well, at a press conference in the UK last week Kermit and Piggy decided to hit back.

Via The Huffington Post.

I stumbled across this online while doing some research earlier this month; it’s an excerpt from a CBC interview with Jim Henson taped on the set of Fraggle Rock in 1983. In it Jim discusses his family, working in television and mentions the then-yet-to-be-released Muppets Take Manhattan and Labyrinth, which Jim describes as “his next fantasy movie.”

Music video for the song Lake Tahoe, from Kate Bush’s latest album 50 Words For Snow. The shadow puppetry in the video was created by Robert Allsopp and Associates.

Via NPR.

This is a nearly 50 year old film produced by Jim Henson that was recently rediscovered and released online by AT&T. Robot is one Jim Henson’s business films from the 1960s, it was shot in 1963 for an elite seminar organized for business owners on the then-brand-new topic of Data Communications.

From the video’s YouTube description:

The seminar itself involved a lot of films and multimedia presentations, and took place in Chicago. A lengthy description of the planning of the Bell Data Communications Seminar — sans a mention of the Henson involvement — is on the blog of Inpro co-founder Jack Byrne. It later was renamed the Bell Business Communications Seminar.

The organizers of the seminar, Inpro, actually set the tone for the film in a three-page memo from one of Inpro’s principals, Ted Mills to Henson. Mills outlined the nascent, but growing relationship between man and machine: a relationship not without tension and resentment: “He [the robot] is sure that All Men Basically Want to Play Golf, and not run businesses — if he can do it better.” (Mills also later designed the ride for the Bell System at the 1964 World’s Fair.) Henson’s execution is not only true to Mills’ vision, but he also puts his own unique, irreverent spin on the material.

The robot narrator used in this film had previously starred in a skit for a food fair in Germany (video is silent), in 1961. It also may be the same robot that appeared on the Mike Douglas Show in 1966. Henson created a different — but similar — robot for the SKF Industries pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair.

Kudos to AT&T for releasing this fascinating little piece of Muppet/Henson history!

Via Tough Pigs.