secret keeper show | Puppet Lady

I have not been posting on the blog regularly for a while because I only have a limited amount of time each week to work on our Rough Magic Theatre projects.

We decided the time would be best spent actually making the puppets, as they are very time consuming. Trying to make the puppets and promote the project on social media at the same time was proving a bit much.

However, it is now a New Year and a bit of a progress report seems like a good idea and hopefully might cheer a few people up in these difficult times.

It feels very hard to motivate myself to keep going with this project (working in a vacuum as we are) but I do feel as if I have made good (if fairly slow) progress.

I have completed front and and profile view “hero face” puppets for Hugo Knox our main character (the crime solving librarian), his daughter/bodyguard Artura, the Prime Minister of the City and I have nearly finished a profile puppet for the Police Chief. So, we have a front face view to complete for him plus puppets for the President and the King of Junk Town.

After those are complete there will be a whole load of single-use puppets and sets to do to complete the first episode.

This video shows a practical experiment at how the front facing “hero faces” will work. We used the “Jabberwocky” poem from our shadow puppet suitcase show for this lip-synch experiment as it is something Tim and I already know off by heart. Tim is controlling the mouth movement and I am doing the eyes/eyebrows. This is not the voice or the words we will actually be using for the Artura character in the finished show. We saw from this that the design for this “hero face” does actually work and so forged ahead with making more for the other main characters that will need re-usable hero face puppets like this.

I also designed profile puppets with nodding head and working jaw for the Prime Minister and Hugo which I am happy with but have not come up with controls for them yet. We will have to experiment to see what sort of controls will be least visible for them.

The Prime Minister of the City (Profile view puppet)

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Hi everyone, apologies for the long break in between posts. We have been busy working on our re-usable “hero face” puppets. The “face-on” puppets will be able to lip-synch and create a number of different facial expressions using the same puppet (rather than having to create a different puppet for each separate emotion).

This is the first one that I have created (not counting the prototype one) and I experimented with laminating it to see if it will work on the OHP flat bed or not. As I suspected, from previous experience, there was an obvious line around the outside edge of the puppet (it is a lot more obvious when you use laminated puppets on the OHP flatbed than if you put them directly against the shadow screen because the OHP flatbed magnifies the puppets considerably). However, I decided not to give up on the laminating idea as the puppet looks fine if the plastic is trimmed close to the edge of the puppet instead of leaving a margin.

I have also created one complete profile head and shoulders puppet and a nearly complete profile “hero face” puppet with nodding head and moving mouth for the Prime Minister.

We have also finished storyboarding the whole of the first episode. I have a list of hero face puppets for various characters that I need to work through and after that I’ll have to examine the story-board in detail to work out all the extra puppets and scenery etc. that will be needed and work my way through all of that.

We’ll also need to work on how best to make the controls and manipulation of the hero faces work in order to minimise rod/control shadows.

Look forward to sharing more with you soon!

Puppet Lady

An Insight Into The Life of a Puppet Theatre Professional

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