25 February 2012

Decommissioned

Slowly ticking along with the Decommissioned (the graphic novel).


It's on a temporary hiatus at the moment while I'm having chats with a potential publisher. Mostly we're talking about print size and page count and stuff like that but it doesn't feel like its worth doing too much more until that has all been sorted out. That's fine. I've got plenty else to keep me busy right now but I'm just itching to dive in and start churning out the pages. Meanwhile here are a few little snippets.





04 February 2012

Highly Strung - In retrospect

Well its taken a few months for me to get around to editing this together (not that I spent a few months on the edit, I just had a bit of other stuff to catch up on) but here it is. A five minute collection of shots from  Highly Strung, the silo show.



Don't expect it to make a whole lot of sense, its all out of sequence and taken from both the rehearsals as well as the final show. Its just a collection of shots to demonstrate the kind of stuff that was going on in the show.

Putting it together, I really wished I had more footage of the puppeteers doing their thing actually. Looking back that's possibly the most interesting aspect of the show for me, the things that people (who were nearly invisible during the performance) had to do to put the giant puppet through its paces.

An early rehearsal where we had 3 operators up on ropes (Wendy, Callum, Kate)
Damo A and Callum on the legs as the puppet is caught in one of the all too common freak gusts of wind
Kete, Damo J, Michelle Anthony, Gareth, Jac, Callum
Michelle McFarlane (Head Turn Technician)
Gareth Llewellin (Chief Up/Down Guy)
Anthony  (Left Elbow Operator) & Kate (the Bird in the Hand)

The coordination required to get the puppet into pose sometimes involved up to 10 people all doing there part and with no way to see how the puppet actually looked. They just had to have faith that, when each of them did X at time Y, it was a good thing.


(photos Michelle McFarlane)

If I did the show again I'd definitely make more of a feature out of the puppeteers, lighting them up rather than hiding them away.