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.

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).

Tough Pigs recently sat down for an exclusive interview with Bonnie Erickson. If you don’t already know Bonnie’s name, you should; she headed the Muppet Workshop for many years during the Muppet Show era (she is credited as as the designer and builder of Miss Piggy, the Muppet Newsman, Statler and Waldorf among many, many other famous characters) and is currently the Executive Director of the Jim Henson Legacy.

Here are links to all four parts of the interview:

• Interview with Bonnie Erickson, part one
• Interview with Bonnie Erickson, part two
• Interview with Bonnie Erickson, part three
• Interview with Bonnie Erickson, part four

It’s a great interview and a must-read for Muppet fans and anyone els curious about what it was like to work in the Muppet workshop in the heyday of the `70s and `80s.

Just some absolutely incredible animatronics by John Nolan.

Hat tip to Dangerous Minds via Sons of Punch.

I was doing some animatronics research the other day and I came across the YouTube channel of veteran FX artist Greg McKee, who has lots of great videos posted on YouTube. This video of a Mon Camamari from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith is probably my favourite, but who doesn’t love Nute Gunray? Or for that matter, who doesn’t want to see a Terminator Robot Kangaroo?

Be sure to explore all of the videos in Greg’s YouTube Channel.

A look at more of the work of Norman Schneider, who was responsible for the frog in last week’s German music video Küssen kann man nicht alleine.

Via Puppet News.

As a rule I don’t generally post about puppet building workshops here, but this one is taking place a mere 20 meteres or so from where I happen to typing this, so I’ll consider it fair game. If you’re in or near Toronto this weekend, Unraku is hosting a marionette making workshop with Kelly Kirkham on Sunday. Kelly (see previous post) is a very talented illustrator and puppet builder here in T.O. who makes truly beautiful, old fashioned paper-mâché hand puppets and marionettes; you can see some example of her work at www.runrabbitrun.ca.

Space in the workshop is limited, but there are still some spots available. Full details are available on the Unraku Blog.

This three part  installment of Steve Johnson’s Rubber Rules series on YouTube (see previous post) offer a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the creation of one of the most iconic puppet characters of the 1980s – Slimer. One of the things I love about Slimer – and one of the reasons was so effective in Ghostbusters – is because he’s an example of a very well designed character that was executed in a very simple, straightforward way.

I’m always bothered by animatronic puppets that are fully cable controlled or performed remotely by servos. Even the most brilliantly designed creatures tend to move in a stiff, unnatural or mechanical way when they don’t have a performer or a puppeteer’s hand inside them unless they are performed and filmed very carefully.

Steve points out in these videos that if Slimer was done today he’d either be a fully animatronic character requiring expensive mechanisms and a larger team of puppeteers, or  (more likely) he’d be a CG effect. While Slimer might not be quite up to the standards of the FX industry today, he’s a great example of how effective a simple, well designed puppet can be.

*Note: I’ve embedded all three parts of this above as a YouTube playlist. You can find the original videos on YouTube – part one, part two and part three.

Via Lost in Schlock.

Puppet Heap (see previous posts) has a great looking all-new website. Check it out at www.puppetheap.com.

Thanks to Ariella at The Heap for the heads-up!

I was sad to learn that noted puppet builder Dave Pavelonis died suddenly of a heart attack over the weekend. If you haven’t seen his work before, it’s incredible. Over the years he worked with some of the best puppeteers in the L.A. scene and I’ve heard several of them praise the quality of his work. Dave was one of those rare puppet builders in film and TV that develop a distinct and original style. When you see one Dave’s puppets, you can usually tell it’s his work right away.

Dave had a reputation in the business for being not just an amazing puppet builder, but also a very kind and generous guy. I exchanged emails with him a few times over the years, but I never had the opportunity to get to know him very well unfortunately. Ironically, one of the film projects I’m involved with right now requires a lot of heavily caricatured puppets and just the other day I had been looking at Dave’s website and contemplating getting in touch with him again to see if he could offer any help or advice. I’m sorry that I’ll never have the chance to talk to him now.

Above you can see some of Dave’s work in action, in his YouTube series Puppet Government, which he made with puppeteers Allan Trautman and Kevin Carlson. You can read more about his career in this profile of him from last year and see more of his work in the Whattacharacter demo reel.

Rest in peace Dave.