Tag Archives: filming

New Liquorice House Mock Up Scene

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Sweet Old Lady?

A Sweet Old Lady?

At last I have revealed some of the images for the forthcoming Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre show.

The fact is, I wouldn’t have bothered to do such a high quality mock-up if it were not for an interesting development. The Vischmarkt Papierentheater Festival is unpaid, and for this reason I have been attempting to attract sponsorship from Liquorice manufacturers. I have thus far been unsuccessful and time is getting short for attracting funders.

I have in fact booked our ferry tickets and our travel insurance now, and in order to at least manage to recoup these costs, we are doing something called “Wefund”. As I understand it, this basically allows anyone who’s interested to contribute to our project within a set time limit and hopefully raise a specified amount of money.

To attract interest in our project, however, you need to make a promotional video. With this in mind, I thought I’d better get some stuff together that was pretty to look at, as well as functional.

For those who are thinking “Wot no real liquorice?” fear not. There will be real liquorice on the scenery of the finished full size version.

I have completed roughly a third of my unpretty mock up puppets and I now have one pretty backdrop and a pretty puppet I can use with them as well. Tomorrow, I am definitely going to finish all of the mock up puppets and sets, no excuses.

I am deligating the video making to Tim, who is doing that tomorrow. I’m afraid I shall be expected to show my face on it at some point, (not looking forward to that!). So, watch this space for more on that soon.

Doubtless you’ll all be delighted to hear that the script is now completely finished. I have also given my music wish-list to a very good musician friend of mine so I can get on with everything else I have to do. All very exciting!

Till you get to see our marvellous video, here is a “trailer” for the Vischmarkt Festival, that someone else has made 🙂

Toy Theatre “Made in Lancaster”

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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On Display at The Duke's Gallery, Lancaster

Toy Theatre-like "Nesting Boxes"

I have recently found out about an interesting local festival that is to be hosted at The Duke’s Theatre in Lancaster. The name of the festival is “Made in Lancaster” and as you might expect it is a showcase of the work of people in Lancaster. It spans many different arts disciplines and is meant to be for edgy experimental or work in progress kind of performances etc. As the theatre day of the festival is on June 11th we do not have any time for new work in progress as we are working on our Hansel & Gretel making and performance for the Vischmarkt Papierentheater Festival to be performed 1-3rd of June. However what we are planning to do is to make a video version of the show before we go to The Netherlands and not only will this mean that the people of Lancaster and anyone else who comes will get to see a version of our Toy Theatre show, and we will have this video then for publicity purposes ourselves, after the event. There are many short film making enthusiasts connected with the Duke’s, both in the Lancaster Film group and also showing their films as part of the Made in Lancaster Festival. So we are hoping that one or two of these gifted individuals will help us out with the filming.

If you’re wondering why we don’t just perform it live, like we will in The Netherlands, the answer is that it does not bind us to being in Lancaster on that date and that the toy theatre and puppets will take a long time to arrange and it would be awkward to slot in between other acts using the same space. We did consider using a live streaming of the performance projected on to a big screen (like George & Ann Neff did for their Nativity show) so that larger numbers could see the performance. But aside from the previously mentioned problems of performing live this would have additional technical elements to deal with and would not necessarily be able to focus on characters and scenery at different distances.

If you’re wondering, what is the picture at the top all about? The answer is that the place where we were holding the meeting about the Made in Lancaster Festival was The Duke’s Gallery, which is inside The Duke’s Theatre building. In this gallery, coincidentally, there were a number of artworks in the form of arty “nesting boxes” which struck me as being reminiscent of Toy Theatres. The whole bird themed exhibition is top quality stuff, very quirky and interesting and definitely worth a look if you’re in the area. Below is a link to an article about the artist who made the above exhibit and another artist involved with the exhibition and it contains Melanie Callaghan‘s email address near the bottom.