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 🙂
Yes, Ladies and Gents, the moment you have all been waiting for has finally arrived,……The new blog post telling you all the latest about our Hansel & Gretel Liquorice theatre show has arrived!
As with Collette and Tim’s previous “meetings” tempers got pretty frayed over the editing of Tim’s lovingly crafted script. Tim wanted to keep all his lovely dialogue and subtle tones and Collette wanted everything to be shorter and more obvious. Tim wanted gritty realism, Collette wanted fairytale magic and emotion.
There was another interesting aspect to Tim’s script which I would like to open up for discussion. As I mentioned in my previous post, the main reason we know the witch in the story is a witch, is because the story teller tells us so, and because she likes to eat children and she lives in an unusual house. She doesn’t do anything magic at all.
Now, in Tim’s script, he has deliberately not mentioned the word “witch”. The character is simply referred to by the children as “the old lady”. Now I am not sure how I feel about this. I was very keen for her to seem sweet and innocent to begin with, but if after she starts behaving horribly towards the children, she is a “normal” person who chooses to behave in this dreadful way, what impression would that give the audience? Would it be a lot nastier and more scary if it is a horrible badly behaved old woman who gets pushed in the oven by Gretel? Is this going to promote capital punishment and taking the law into our own hands? If she is a witch, does it make it slightly better because she is a magical being of some sort and part of the whole “not to be taken seriously” allegorical nature of the fairytale?
Those who remember “Spitting Image” will know, that there is a lot one can get away with subject matter wise simply by using puppets to do it. Puppets are not realistic, they can say what they want and they are only puppets, (the fact that a human being is actually putting words into their mouth is something you can get away with). It is similar with “The Simpsons”. Because it is a cartoon the format lets the makers of the show deal with challenging subject matter and no-one bats an eyelid. Despite the fact that it is obviously a show with adult content, many parents let their kids watch it because it is a cartoon. I would like my show to be scary, but at a suitable level for young children. On the other hand, one doesn’t want to cater to the scaredy cat little kid too much.
On one occasion when I was putting on a show in a school; we had not brought out any puppets, we hadn’t said anything and my co-performer and I came on and were just about to start speaking when a girl collapsed into terrified tears and had to be taken out. We were honestly not alarming in appearance, and I can only think it was the shock of us being real people who were actually there, rather than being safely behind a television screen. I think the 2-d figures of the toy theatre may do a lot to mitigate any realism in the script as they are very obviously not real.
We have also made a start on the music. I have been having much fun playing with keyboards, drum machines, actual drums, tin whistles etc. and recording stuff into the computer. This is the very first time that we are using recorded music for a show. This is for practical reasons as we will have far too much to do with the scenery and characters to be playing live music too. Having said that, I am using live type instruments and sound effects and recording them into the computer – they will be transferred to an mp3 player and then played through a very useful pa system of modest proportions as and when necessary. We are using a very useful piece of free software called “Audacity” and it is a lot of fun finding out how to edit music in this way.
So the next jobs are – mocking up sets and puppets, creating a lighting plan and finishing off the music. In the meanwhile why not leave your comments or vote in my poll about the “witch” issue mentioned previously. Watch this space for more news, coming some time next week!
Puppet Lady 