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.

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.

We dit it We did it we Did it we did It!

....A bit windy mind you, but it was great to finally get it up there after all the work. Apparently there were about 2000 people in the audience. Not a bad turn out for a show that seemed destined not to happen on a ferociously windy night.

A big thanks to everybody involved who worked their guts out to make it happen, especially the puppeteers who were seriously battling the elements on Saturday. Anthony, Jillian, Michelle, Callum, Kate, Gareth, Damo (1 & 2), Kete, Jacq,  Wendy & Scott. You guys are awesome. Also thanks to Helen for coping with the Herculean sewing task and Paul for taking the giant-sized, person-shaped tent and turning into a puppet that did stuff. Sound and light were a big part of the show as well so thanks Stephen for composing the tracks and Outlook for making the show seen and heard.

Thanks also to the funding bodies, Arts Victoria, Festivals Australia and Australia Council We couldn't have done it without you.

D day

Tonights the night, and the weather is a shocker.

crazy winds.

All we need is a half hour break in the weather


stay tuned

The Making of a Giant Puppet - Part 6 (face tech)

All through the development process the what to do with the face has been a bit of an unknown,

So many options...

A:Building a physical face on the puppet

• Pros: Simple. Reliable. Always stays fixed on the face.
• Cons: Needs still more operators to make it work in an already crowd ground crew.

(photos Michelle McFarlane)

B:Projecting one from the ground that can be controlled from the operating desk and automatically tracking it to the head.

• Pros: Easy to set up control.
• Cons: Hard to convincingly projec t the face as it turns to profile. Auto tracking seems a bit inconsistant and laggy.

C:Mounting a projector inside the head itself that can be controlled remotely from the operating desk.

• Pros: Animated face will allways line up perfectly with the physical face.
• Cons: Battery powered projectors are relatively dim compared to AC ones (like 50 lumens compared to  10,000).

D: Some combination of the above

• Pros: Takes advantage the best of all possibilities.
• Cons: Too many options.

With a week to go we still havent decided yet...but damn I'm having a good time.



We also just addded a buch of coloured lights into the puppet which changes things a bit (making the non-brightness of the battery projector even more of an issue).

Tending towards option D but head awhirl with the possibilies. Whichever way we end up going Ive had a ball playing around with it.

The Making of a Giant Puppet -Part 5 (it lives!)

Finally got the sucker up on the silos...

First in dribs and drabs...An arm here (photo by Gareth Llewellin)...

...A head there... 

Until we finally plucked up the courage to raise the whole thing.

 

Several months later... it all turned out remarkably close to the original design.

Now we just need to work it into the show. We seem to have a fair degree of control over it (unless its windy which is most of the time). Being so dependent on the weather is abit unnerving but we've little option right now but to carry on.

The Making of a Giant Puppet - Part 4 (the dream shed)

Luckily for us, Graincorp generously gave us permission to use one of their sheds. Just a few hundred meters from the silos where we're doing the show. A genuinely substantial shed. A shed fit for a puppet. Big enough for the puppet to sit up in and with easily accessible rigging points. In hindsight I can't image how we could have even thought about doing this show without a shed like this. Like several other things that have just fallen into place. It really was just freakish good luck.

Meanwhile the riggers Damian, Gareth, Wendy and Paul were prepping the silo

 (rigging photos by Gareth Llewellin)

We started hauling up bits and pieces of puppet checking what each bit did with the wind and, slowly, gaining confidence