I love Beaker… Poor guy.

I meant to post this a week ago, but it remains funny so nothing is lost. If you do not already follow Dr. Eldritch, you really should.  However, this particular issue might be my favorite. For obvious reasons.  Here’s the start of this storyline, but you should read the whole thing.

I know exactly how Mr. Puppeteer feels. In fact, there are parts of this conversation that could be a direct transcription of my life.

Rob and I have returned from seeing Avatar.  His verdict? It’s just bad.  Mine?  It’s very silly, with horrifically bad science and yet, if you are a visually based person, it is worth seeing on the big screen in 3-D.

If you are a logic based person, then skip this film.

Question: If every life form on the planet has nostrils in their necks and six limbs, why do the Na’vi have noses like we do and only four limbs?

Question: Where do the feathers on the bow and arrows come from since we never see a feather creature, ever.

Question: Kiss? What is this thing you call kiss, James Cameron? I mean really, there are HUMAN cultures that don’t have kissing.

I could go on. That said, it’s some damn impressive CGI.

I am feeling unspeakably old. No, no, it’s not because of the elf costume that I’m wearing at work these days, though it is work related.

One of the men working in operations came up to me at work last night and said, “Does the phrase, ‘It happened in Narnia,’ mean anything to you?”

I hedged my bets and said, “It might…” because all I could think of was that someone had told him about the white spandex suit I used to have to wear in a production of the show.

The he said, “Do you remember little K— P—?”

My jaw dropped. Really. That’s not a metaphor. When I had last seen him, he had been twelve or thirteen years old playing Edmund. Now, I know that people age and realistically, I recognize that it has been 13 years or so since we worked together, but– but… he was twelve and now he’s an adult peer.

Today was a strange blend of things.

We got home from San Jose yesterday afternoon and I immediately had to get caught up with all the excitement about Harlequin — which oddly, usually would mean that I was talking about a puppet. So I wound up staying up way too late to help with that.

Which meant that today I was lazing in the bathrobe, doing some sketches for a puppet gig (not involving a Harlequin) when the phone rang. It was the Portland Spirit, asking if I could come in and cover a shift. Like, right then.

Off I went to the boat and spent several hours on the water busing dishes. Exciting, yes?

Back home, I returned to drawing and now I am sad because the stuff I’m working on is cool, but it’s for a film so I can’t talk about any of it until later.  I’m not very sad, because this is fairly standard, but I just always feel dull when I have no puppetry to write about.

Holy cow! Puppeteers will know exactly why I just flipped, but I’ve found a video of Hansjürgen Fettig demonstrating his puppets. I’ve used his book as one of my puppet building bibles for years and seen the figures in exhibition but until this moment have never seen one in motion.

Oh. My. God. I have never wished to speak French more than I do right now.

Edited to add: Juliette Wade, linguist and SF writer, has just sent me a transcription of the video. Why? Because she is made of awesome.
Continue reading Hansjürgen Fettig interview

I spent the day teaching puppetry up in Fremont at James Leitch Elementary. One of the interesting things about schools is that they all have different name structures for the teachers. In some I’m Mary, usually Miss Mary, and sometimes Mrs. Kowal.

I always use the married version of the honorific when I’m filling out forms but it’s exceedingly rare to actually have someone call me “Mrs. Kowal.”  It feels a little like I’m pretending to be a grownup.

All of this is percolating around in my head because Rob and I are celebrating our eighth anniversary this week. November 17th, 2009 we got married in Chattanooga, TN. I am as deeply in love with my husband as I was on our wedding day.

To celebrate eight years of being Mrs. Kowal, I’m disconnecting from the outside world.  No phone, no internet.  Just Mr. Kowal and me.

I just got home from seeing Where the Wild Things Are which I really loved. I thought it hit all the right notes and was quite moving.  I encourage you to go see it on the big screen.

The Wild Things are an amazing combination of body suit with animatronic faces, that were later enhanced with cgi.  It is, I have to say, utterly seamless.  The team of people who created each character deserves a big hand for really compelling performances.

When the credits rolled they had each of the Wild Things listed with their voice performer and their suit performer, which made me very happy.  Too often, the puppeteers get ignored altogether or lumped into a group at the end.  The lumping is sometimes unavoidable because complex puppets are frequently team efforts and it’s hard to sort out who did what.  So it was nice to see a film that acknowledged the fact that the guys in the suits are on set all the time, while the voice performers have more limited contact with the rest of the cast.  Not to downplay their performance, by any stretch, ’cause bad voicing can ruin good puppetry.

It’s just a pet peeve because there are times when a puppeteer or matchmove artist works for months on a show and then isn’t credited.

So.

I was excited and the credits had rolled too fast for me to really catch the names of the suit performers. I headed to IMDB.

Which does not list the suit performers for the characters.

WTF? Who made that decision?

I finally found the list of the cast over at FanCast, which does credit them and they deserve kudos for giving truly expressive body language to the characters.

• Vincent Crowley as Carol Suit Performer
• Sonny Gerasimowicz as Alexander Suit Performer
• Nick Farnell as Judith Suit Performer
• Sam Longley as Ira Suit Performer
• Angus Sampson as The Bull Suit Performer
• Mark McCracken as The Bull Additional Suit Performer
• John Leary as Douglas Suit Performer
• Alice Parkinson as KW Suit Performer
• Garon Michael as KW Additional Suit Performer

Well done, all of you.

Several people have sent me links to the latest batch of Giant Puppets. These are impressive feats of engineering and teamwork, but I have to admit that they don’t do anything for me.  I do recognize that the effect of being there and watching them move would be different from videos, but that’s true of most theater. No, what I fail to get is the point.  Big.  But besides the bigness…

I mean, what are they doing with the Giantness of the puppets besides being Giant?  I’ve always felt like the form of the creation should reflect the story being told and that the story is the kernel of the design. Here it seems backwards. It feels as though someone decided to make Big Puppets but then has them do ordinary things which become exceptional only because of their scale.

IMAX also doesn’t do anything for me, generally, with the one exception being a documentary about the Grand Canyon. There the scale of the screen absolutely gave more to the story of the Grand Canyon than a smaller screen would have. Star Trek? Yawn.

Big puppets?  If they were telling a story that reflected their size, I’d be excited. Of course, I think the same is true of writing. Is it so much to want people to think about the story first and then figure out the best way to tell it?

While I was at WorldCon, Howard Tayler asked me to swing by and participate in the Writing Excuses podcast panel.  He described it as a bunch of fifteen minute podcasts in front of a live audience, which, I must say, was great fun.

Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler and Dan Wells are very engaging hosts and made me feel quite welcome. For the first episode, Brandon asked me if there was anything I particularly wanted to talk about.  I said that lately I’ve been talking about how puppetry intersects with my fiction.  So we spent fifteen minutes talking about the four principles of puppetry.

They’ve just posted the podcast, so go give it a listen.

Then, if you are curious, you can go read the Puppetry Manipulation Clinic handout I have over on my puppetry website.

Back in 1985, Leonard Nimoy hosted a show on Nicklodeon called Lights, Camera, Action. In this clip he talks about homemade special effects.

via Props

I’m home from Orlando although I desperately wanted to stay longer. While I pack boxes for the Big Move, here’s another of my favorites from the Handmade Puppet Dreams series.

The Whole World and You by Tally Hall, directed by Frankie Cordero

Have you ever had this nagging thing that you knew was wrong, but you couldn’t figure out what? For the last two years, I’ve known that the props work wasn’t satisfying, but I didn’t realize how much I missed the world of puppetry until coming down here this weekend. Some of it was performing, but more of it was hanging out with puppeteers.

We had dinner last night with twelve puppeteers, only three of whom spoke English as a native language. It was this great wide ranging conversation about art and connection.

Today we performed twice, which went well. I got to see the short film series Heather Henson curates, Handmade Puppet Dreams which I’ve been wanting to see for a couple of years now. Here’s one of the pieces, Incubus by Lyon Hill.

Before you watch this, you need to know that these are puppets and are being performed in real time. I tell you this, because otherwise it looks like animation or photoshop. No. Puppets.

See! Totally inspiring.

Afterwards we went out to dinner and I just…I’ve really missed this. Puppeteers talk about their in ways that writers don’t. I mean, we’ll sit around and say, “I’m thinking about doing this one man show…” and everyone will join in this collaborative discussion without (most people) without ever trampling on the other person’s vision. I love writing, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve missed collaboration.

Anyway, it was a wonderful weekend.

Rehearsal tonight went fairly smoothly. I’m fortunate to have a pretty good kinetic memory, which means I learn blocking quickly. I compensate for this by having almost no memory for names and a poor one for faces. Luckily! I don’t need either of those when learning a new show.

Even accounting for the kinetic memory, I’m finding Tiger Tales spectacularly easy to learn because someone else is doing all the voices, so all I have to do is focus on the manipulation. Also, because it’s a shadow puppet show, using an overhead projector, I only have to learn my blocking in two dimensions. My puppets, with one exception, always enter from stage left.

The challenge comes once they are on stage because, well, somone else is doing all the voices. While that relieves me from the pressure of learning lines, it also means that I have to pay ferocious amounts of attention to the inflections of his voice and try to match my movement to his. Add to that the fact that my puppets can only move in two dimensions and I have to use that narrow range to express emotion. Some of the figures have no moving parts at all, so it’s all about the angle and rhythm of their movement.

So this show, which on the surface looks so easy to learn, actually presents interesting challenges to perform well.

If you are near Orlando on Saturday, I hope you come see a show and say hello afterwards. And now, I need to go finish packing.

Breaking news!

I’ll be in Orlando at the International Orlando Puppet Festival, curated by Heather Henson on July 25th.  I’m performing in Tiger Tales by Chinese Theatre Works.

The whole festival looks amazing and I’m sorry to be there for only one weekend.