I’m very happy to announce that I’ll be doing the puppet design for a production of Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants at Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston, Texas. This adaptation is by Robert Kimbro. He and I have worked together on other projects in the past and I’m incredibly excited to be involved in this world premiere.

It’s scheduled for May of 2011. I’ll keep you posted as more details develop.

Making a trailer is a multi-part process and I thought it might be interesting if I described what went into making the Shades of Milk and Honey trailer.

Stage One: Defining the parameters

Budget: Before anything else happened, Rob and I sat down to talk about how much we could afford to spend. Money, sadly, defines pretty much everything that follows. In our case, we wanted to keep the budget under $500, which is unreasonably small for a commercially produced trailer but about as much as we thought we could throw into the pot.  For a trailer with commercially produced new footage, you can expect to spend a minimum of $1000 per minute.  In our case we had several things going for us, mostly that we work in film and theater so had a number of favors we could call in. Most of the budget would go to materials and hiring the talent.

Venue/Audience: These often linked, but not always. In our case, knowing that we wanted this trailer to be online does affect several things. It means that we know it will be mostly viewed very small. We know that it will be watched by people who are in the midst of doing other things.

Length: The next question was defining the length. Both of us thought that shorter was probably better and were leaning to something in the two minute range. Any shorter and it would be hard to have content. Longer and people would click away.

Style: Only now do we start talking about what it looks like. (You’ll note that we still aren’t discussing content.)  We sat down and tossed around several ideas. Since I’m a professional puppeteer, it made sense to take advantage of that. Among other things, visually this would make the trailer stand out from other ones.

But what style of puppetry. I narrowed it down to period appropriate puppetry styles which meant either hand puppets, shadow puppets, marionettes or  possibly toy theater, though stretching the definition of “period.”

Marionettes I discarded immediately because they are too expensive to build. Hand puppets have a Punch and Judy connotation which is wrong for the feel of Shades of Milk and Honey. Toy Theater has a similar look to animation but without the fluidity.

Shadow theater… There were two main reasons we settled on shadow theater. One: I actually have a shadow play in the novel. Two: At this point in England, silhouettes were very popular and they were called “shades.”  It seemed too perfect to resist

We did update to a modern form of shadow theater, called shadow mask, because it allowed us to have a stylized form with the fluidity of actors.

The stark black and white also meant that we could make the glamour look really spectacular. We asked our friend Remo Bacall, the BAFTA award winning special effects supervisor from Lazytown, if he would be willing to create the glamour fx.  He was, which gave us the ability to add fully rendered color to our shadows scenes.

Content: Only now do we start talking about content.  The reason we wait so late for this is that content is frequently dictated by what you can afford and what looks good in the style you are using.  I should clarify that “content” is not the same as subject matter. The subject matter is the novel. The content is what we use to talk about the subject mater. Make sense?

In the next post, I’ll talk about how we defined the content.

I’ve arrived in NYC where I will be until Thursday morning.  I’m reading from Shades of Milk and Honey at the KGB Fantastic Fiction series on Wednesday night with Laura Anne Gilman. You should come.

For those who have been following my travel adventures,  you will be pleased and baffled to know that I had no transit problems on this trip, at all. Bear in mind that I was travelling on Friday the 13th.

It confuses me too.

Upon my arrival, I went straight to the Puppet Kitchen where I got pulled into helping build a duplicate of one of the dog puppets we built when I lived here before.  It was fun and felt like I’d come home. I do miss building puppets and working there.

Afterwards, I went out for drinks and a light dinner with friends. My current plan for the evening is to go to bed and sleep.

Someone just asked me if I like fan mail and my immediate thought was “Yes! I love getting fan mail,” but you have to understand…  See, the VAST majority of the fan mail I’ve received has been from the Kindergarten-6th grade crowd in the form of a homework assignment after a puppet show.  There are drawings! And spelling errors which make everything worthwhile. One of the joys came from reading them phonetically aloud.

Here is a transcript of my favorite.  It came with a quite good drawing of the Pied Piper.

Dear Rears of Joy,

I licked your pupies. Hope you came agin. I licked Rumplestilstkin too.  If you come back I’ll lick them all again.

Your fred

[name redacted]

How, I ask you, how could anything possible top the beauty of that?

There’s more information about the novel and the people behind the traler at http://www.ShadesOfMilkAndHoney.com/trailer. I will shamelessly ask that you pass that link around to anyone that you think might like it.

Meanwhile, I thought you might like to know a little about how the trailer is made. We’re using a style of puppetry called Shadow Masks. The style was originated by Larry Reed of Shadowlight in San Fransisco and it combines the grace of a human performer with the stylization of shadow puppetry.

All of the set pieces are created with small cut paper vignettes on an overhead projector, while the performers work next to a paper screen with the masks. So when the Lady (Sarah Frechette) is sitting at the fortepiano, that’s a practical bench and a shadow fortepiano. Sarah is a puppeteer by trade but we also had two members of the Oregon Regency Society in to play the seamstress (Suzannah Hamlin) and the gentleman (Jason Stanley). They do a wonderful job and I wish you could see some of shots we didn’t use, which really show off their beautiful sense of movement.

The magic, which in the world of the novel is called glamour, is CG and created by Remo Balcells, a BAFTA award winning special effects supervisor, and his assistant Johnathan Nation.

I was talking with a friend of mine and he said that my blog read like “Mary’s Greatest Hits,” because I never talk about the things that go wrong. This surprised me since most of my best puppetry stories are of shows that go horribly, horribly wrong. But he’s right. When I talk about television I’ll say “Oh, this shot was really hard, but we got it in the end.”  And in fiction, the stuff that goes wrong usually gets fixed in private.  I realized that it’s because I never think about things in television or fiction as going as horribly wrong in the same way they do on stage. I mean, things in stage will go bad in rehearsal, but you rarely tell stories about it. That’s part of the process and the only things that matter are the things the audience sees. In television, I screw up and we do it again. In fiction, that’s what the delete key is for.  It never really seems to me like things go wrong.

So, I will now tell you the story of the Worst Show I Ever Did. Continue reading Things that go horribly, horribly wrong OR The worst show I ever did

Awesome! My friends at the Puppet Kitchen were on ABC news this week. Check it out.

See! Saying things like  ”Pass me an eyeball” is perfectly natural.

Props master, Eric Hart, speaks intelligently about sharing knowledge.

We do not invent things whole cloth out of the depths of our brains. Every idea we have is formed by making connections with all the experiences we have absorbed. Every book we read, play we watch, conversation we have, event we witness, song we hear – all of this fills our head and swirls around, sometimes for years, before getting regurgitated as a new flash of inspiration. We are seldom cognizant of how this works. The bizarre surreality of our dreams are a testament to that. But even dreams are simply what we already know, broken into tiny pieces and stitched back together in the most arbitrary fashion.

Until the early part of the 1900s, puppeteers jealously guarded the secrets of their craft, passing it down within families. Puppetry didn’t change much. Then a group of puppeteers decided to stop reinventing things and started sharing knowledge. They started looking at the puppetry of other countries and traditions and the twentieth century saw an enormous growth in creativity and style.

Read what Eric has to say on sharing and secret knowledge.

Why did I think that two weeks would be enough time to be here?

Last night, after I returned from Philadelphia, I went to Henson Alternative: Stuffed and Unstrung with Jodi, Emily and Delia. It was loads of fun and some pretty impressive improv.  With Muppets.

Then this morning, I went uptown to meet with Bob Howe, who is the incoming secretary for SFWA, to do some training on his new duties.  This was fun because we spent a lot of time catching up.

From there I came back to the apartment briefly to take a nap then off to Labapalooza. Sadly, due to a train mixup I wound up missing the first piece by Serra Hirsch. Naturally, this was the one that I had gone intending to see. Annoying.  On the plus side I ran into an old friend that I haven’t seen in years who was there with someone else that I’d met during the auditions. The world is a very tiny place.

Tomorrow I’m doing an interview/reading for Hour of the Wolf with Jim Freund. The show will be this Saturday. Normally, it’s live but we’re recording it since I’m going home.  In fact, I’ll be heading straight to the airport after we are done.

I did not actually manage to see everyone I wanted to this trip so it’s lucky that I’ll be back in about two weeks.

At some point, I’ll spend more than two weeks at home with my husband. Who I miss.

The National Puppetry Conference at the Eugene O’Neil Theater center is one of my favorite things. It’s a ten-day intensive workshop focused on performance and the development of new works. At the end there are performances.

This is from a couple of years ago and a fine example of puppeteer humor. Every person at the O’Neil had a control attached to this marionette. We all focused on the puppet and moved our controls with careful intensity but our goal was to not move the puppet. At all.

Trust me. If you are a puppeteer, this is hilarious.

I should probably explain a little bit about what happens after an audition. In fiction, when I submit a story I will eventually hear back from a market with either an acceptance or a rejection. With auditions, you only hear back if they want to invite you on to the next level.

So the thing I do when I walk out of an audition is to close the door behind me. As a metaphor, think of it as leaving things tidy so the flies don’t get in, flies being the “what ifs” that can buzz around in my brain.

I’m pretty clearly not moving on to the next round for the big horse, but that may or may not mean anything for the colt track.  There’s no way to tell and it’s too easy to go crazy waiting to hear.

So I try to close the door and move on. If it opens and I get to go back in, that is awesome.  Meanwhile, it’s nothing to fret about.

You know how you can tell when someone on tour has gone insane? It’s when they make something like this.

So hard to look away…

These are not the horse puppets you are looking for…

It turns out that thinking of this as a callback wasn’t quite accurate.  This was really for a different part within the same show, I think, since I was the only woman there who had also been tried on the big horse. The group was multi-ethnic which was really nice to see especially since the play is set in France and England in WWI.

The colt is significantly harder in many ways that the big horse.  Though with fewer moving parts, the small size meant that I had to bend at the waist to reach the front legs, which is less comfortable than standing straight up.  The legs also aren’t attached to the puppets body and rely on the puppeteer to make the connection. So you are working to keep things lined up and act with it as well.  Doable, but it takes a bit more thought than the big horse who is built to move like a horse.

Once you get the hang of him though he is gorgeous. One of the other teams on the colt did this fabulous rearing thing with him. And his head is just… I mean these are really beautiful and very evocative puppets. I am a total geeky fan girl here and am pretty sure I had a ridiculous smile on my face the whole time I was there.

We also did some work with paper people, which were close to lifesize puppets made for the workshop.  Those were fun three-person figures. I actually spent more time working those than on the colt.  One of the teams I was on really clicked I thought and felt very much in sync.

After that, we were sent off to read in a more traditional audition format.  As you might guess, I do mostly puppet auditions and had serious nerves going in. Fortunately, everyone is extraordinarily nice.  It went mostly okay. I had one place where I thought I had jumped to the wrong part of the scene but hadn’t… sigh. Anyway, I asked if I could start again and the second try went better.

My one French line came out clean and with emotion, which was a relief. All things considered, I felt like I presented myself well and that everything else is stuff that is out of my control.

I’m skipping stuff since basically the report is: I had fun. The colt puppet is beautiful. I have no idea about anything beyond that.

I’m off to my audition. It isn’t until 3pm but I want to allow an hour to get there — love NY — and figure I’ll spend the remaining time at Central Park watching the carriage horses. Also, sitting still is really no longer an option.

I spent the evening working on the scene with Jodi, in English. Then Sam, who grew up in the Congo, helped me with the French. I am NOT going to try to act the scene in French, but I feel comfortable reading it aloud at least.

This morning I’ve alternated between running lines and watching videos of foals.

And then, in a fine example of what my life is like right now, I’m going out to dinner with my fabulous literary agent, Jennifer Jackson, and one of my erstwhile first readers, Michael Curry.

And did I mention that I get to play with an amazing puppet for an hour?

I’m going in tomorrow with 8 other women for a mini-workshop/audition for the colt Joey. The female puppeteer on it also doubles as a French woman in the show.  After the workshop, they’ll also have me read the scene as an actor.

The actor part is significantly harder for me because she is, um, French and I don’t speak any at all. When they asked if I spoke French, I said, “No, but I can totally have it by January 1.”

She laughed.

“No, really. I say this in all seriousness. I’ve taken Bengali, Manderin, Italian, German and Icelandic. I can definitely pick up French with six months warning.” Heck, Bengali was a six week cram — granted, I remember none of it now but with six months? No problem. Besides I need to learn it anyway for Glamour in Glass which is set in French-speaking Belgium. See how nicely my writing and theater careers coincide?

Anyway, they are very kindly letting me audition in English but I’m going to work with a friend who is a native French speaker so I can (hopefully) produce some French sentences tomorrow for them, just so they know I can make the sounds.

At the moment though, I’m mostly focused on the fact that this means I didn’t suck yesterday. Woot!