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!