Tag Archives: materials

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 🙂

Edward Lear Again…

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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Edward Lear's "The New Vestments"

Gok Wan, eat your heart out!

Some of you may be wondering what is happening with my new shadow puppet suitcase show, “Edward Lear’s Nonsense”.

Just to confirm, this brand new show will be appearing at the Skipton Puppet Festival in September 2011.

As the Vischmarkt Papierentheater Festival is in June I shall obviously be mainly concentrating on that first. In the meantime, however for all of you shadow puppetry fans out there here’s a few things to be thinking about.

The shadow puppet in the picture is made in a different way to the majority of my previous shadow puppets. In order to show the detail of the different foods that the “Old Man”‘s costume is made of, I felt a lot of cut out detail, with pieces of coloured lighting gel would be the best way to show what the character is wearing, which is in fact the main subject of the story.

As my shadow screen is very small, I shall have to show close up detail of individual bits of the man’s clothing one at a time as they are introduced so that the audience can really see what they are made of.

Something that is much on my mind with relation to this new show is music. In my other suitcase show “Jabberwocky!” I composed a tune specially to fit in with the poem which I sing, live as an accompaniment to the puppets movement. I think that many people like this musical element of the show in particular and it is something a bit different and special in comparison to other puppet shows I have seen.

However, thanks to the Puppet Centre Trust, a few years back I did a very good voice workshop for puppetry professionals. I used a section of the Jabberwocky poem to practice story telling and different ways of using the voice and it was possible to inject a lot of drama and interest into the words through speaking rather than singing the words. It is possible that attempting to impose a repeating verse type tune on the words of Lear’s poem would remove some of the drama and meaning from the words and possibly make it less easy for the audience to pick out the words in the first place. Considering that a lot of people are not familiar with the poem, “The New Vestments” it is especially important that the audience be able to hear every word so they can follow the story.

I have now got the potential to use recorded music and sound effects for the show as I have recently purchased a very neat, very portable P.A. system suitable for use with the shadow suitcase.

So now I am going to turn the idea over to you my faithful blog readers, who thinks that I should attempt to put the poem to a tune and sing it, and who thinks I should use background music, percussion or sound effects and speak the poem in a dramatic way? Please vote now! And if you haven’t voted on my previous poll regarding the name of this new show, please vote on that one too.