Over at Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow writes: Last week in Toronto, I happened upon a delightful busker hidden inside a puppet theater that advertised “Improv Song on Demand.” As Alice and I stood before it, a puppet emerged and offered us a song. Alice asked for a song about Star Trek and got this gem.” [...]
The first of Monster Factory’s online shorts (see previous post) has been released.
As most of you know, I’m one of the co-founders of Unraku, a puppetry studio in Toronto that combines the talents of several puppeteers and puppet builders who work in diverse styles of puppetry. All of us there adore the work of Kelly Kirkham (see previous post) – another one of Unraku’s co-founders – who [...]
Even though it’s been about seven years since I put my short-lived puppet web series Bear Town online (check out an episode on YouTube), I still occasionally get asked if I’m ever going to do something with it. Well, after a few false starts, I’m happy to finally say that the answer is “hopefully”. I [...]
This is a “finger puppet remix” of The Mysterious Ticking Noise, the most popular puppet video in YouTube’s history that we produced over a year ago at Unraku. The audio is from Neil Cicierega’s original video, but the puppet stage and hand crocheted finger puppets were made by the Unraku workshop.
My first professional puppetry job was with Famous PEOPLE Players (FPP) back in the mid-to-late `90s. A big part of their act has always been using Bunraku-style black light puppetry to pay homage to famous artists (hence the name “Famous PEOPLE Players”) and they do puppets of celebrities just about as well as anyone out [...]
If you’re familiar with the “Ugly Doll” plush toy phenomenon or a regular at any of the art or craft shows in Toronto, you may already know the work of Monster Factory. They’re a company based here in Toronto that produce line of colourful Monster plush toys and have been doing a lot of puppetry work over the past year or two.
I already shared this on Twitter and a few other places yesterday, but since early February myself and Robin Polfuss have been training a group of eight puppeteers for an going film project that Unraku is doing. We’ve been teaching them to work with monitors and use different types of puppets on camera, including Bunraku-style [...]
I just watched two clips from the upcoming NFB adaptation of the Maurice Sendack classic Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life and I haven’t been this excited to see a puppet film in awhile. It’s directed by Canadian filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski who previously directed the acclaimed stop motion film Madame Tutli-Putli. Higglety Pigglety Pop is done in a hybrid style that’s very similar to Tutli-Putli, utilizing live-action puppets, actors, animation and digital manipulation.
While I wasn’t blogging over the summer, I was doing a series of improv puppetry workshops and rehearsals with Unraku. It was a really interesting, challenging experience because while I consider myself a pretty decent puppeteer, I’m terrible at improv. Fortunately, Stacey was teaching us and she’s always devastatingly funny and a blast to work [...]
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