Culture & Tourism | Puppet Lady

Here’s a bit more on the writing process from Rough Magic Theatre’s Tim Austin:

The trouble with starting again is that you get very attached to scenes and dialogue that you’ve already put together. Something said by your main character gets a giggle or sounds profound,… is there a way to keep it?

Simply put: No. You can’t be precious or sentimental when writing fiction. You’ve got to be brutal and ruthless or you’ll end up going in circles.

I wrote three chapters of a disaster story many years ago and I could not, for the life of me, figure out why chapter four wasn’t working and why I couldn’t get beyond it. Eventually I realised that I’d made some psychological errors back in Chapter 2 that meant the main character’s headspace was wrong by the time it came to concluding that act. Two chapters had to go. And they did.

Because the beauty of starting again is that sometimes the new stuff that you write is better than you wrote before. You’re working with new ideas and new challenges and that takes you in different and interesting directions.

Sometimes you can recycle a line or two, sometimes not. The trick is to not get attached.

I’ve now worked out a new plot to run through the series. It’s more intimate, more detailed and more interesting than the original. Starting from scratch allowed me to look at the format again and concentrate more on individual motivations. Maybe it’ll make the crafting and shooting process a bit more complex but it’ll also make the finished series better.

And that’s the aim.

The Secret Keeper will be as rich and fully-formed as any HBO or BBC drama. It’s a full-fat sci-fi thriller,….. just animated with shadows. A Film Noir mystery in light and dark.

The pilot version of episode One is in Pre-production, with puppets now being drawn and cut. Audio for this rough-cut (to be used to gather funding for the series) will be recorded in the next two weeks. Filming is likely to start in November.

You can see the original post on Tim’s blog by clicking HERE

If you missed “Writing the Secret Keeper – Part 1” CLICK HERE

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Hello lovely peeps! Here’s the latest installment of behind the scenes footage with story-boarding and experiments in shadow puppetry techniques from Collette Knowles and Tim Austin of Rough Magic Theatre:

We intend to film the series in our house and we happen to have an underground store room with no windows which we use for storing our props, puppets and costumes. During my maternity leave the puppets etc. have been languishing unloved in the dark for a considerable time, (and I have had two lots of maternity leave fairly close together) and the room has also become a repository for various bulky items of baby equipment as the children have outgrown them.

It occurred to me that if we could clear/reorganise the space then the lack of windows would mean that we could achieve absolute blackout without fiddling about with blackout blinds. We had been considering using my work area (what was intended to be the living room of the house) as the performance area but this has accumulated even more (if you can believe it) clutter than the store room so would be less easy to get ready to start experimental filming etc. Also if I get my work area clear as well I can use that as a puppet making production area and leave the performance/filming area already set-up in the store room and not have to keep setting it up over and over. This will be important if we want to have consistency in our filming work.

I am the sort of person who does not like throwing things away so I discovered a lot of bags full of “useful bits of wire”, “useful odds and ends of foam rubber” (these were cut off a larger block when sculpting a puppet) as well as string, staples, fabric remnants and other more obviously useful items plus things that shouldn’t really be in there at all.

I have got it to the stage where we should be able to see if it is possible to set-up our rig in there, and try things out in various positions to see what works best or indeed at all!

Before……
….After – though I suspect there will be further “After” shots to come when we get further along with things.