Hey, if you are in or near Carlsbad, CA, allow me to recommend an amazing exhibit. The World on a String: Puppets from the Alan Cook Collection of The International Puppetry Museum. The exhibit runs till December 30, 2011 and is one of the best collections of puppetry you’ll likely get a chance to see.

See the world through wooden eyes with puppets from Bucharest, Palermo, Bali, Africa, Asia, North America and many more points around the globe. Featuring over 120 puppets from all over the world, this exhibition is on loan from the International Puppet Museum of Pasadena, and features a portion of the Alan Cook Collection, founder and director of the Museum.

via City of Carlsbad – William D. Cannon Art Gallery.

Wow. It should not surprise me that this is an impressive trailer given that its provenance. Kevin McTurk, the creator, has been doing amazing work in puppetry for years. This film will be appearing in Heather Henson’s Handmade Puppet Dreams 2012 series. Looking forward to that in big, big ways.

The Narrative of Victor Karloch [Official Trailer] from Kevin McTurk on Vimeo.

He’s using 30″ rod puppets, shadow puppets and in camera effects to create what promises to be a deeply eerie film. You can read more about the Narrative of Victor Karloch at the Spirit Cabinet.

(Hat-tip to Grá Linnea)

As part of Muppet Week at Tor.com, I talk about the impact that Jim Henson had on modern puppetry. Here’s a teaser.

Let me be clear, before we start, that I’m about to geek out on puppetry. Jim Henson is why I’m a professional puppeteer today, even though I never met him. Like many puppeteers, I grew up watching Sesame Street and The Muppet Show and before I discovered the wider world of puppetry.

Now, I’m also a science fiction writer and here’s the thing… Henson would be a really good subject for an Alternate History story of the “Duck Mr. President” variety, where a single change could affect the entire time line.

I do not exaggerate. The face of modern puppetry would be completely different if not for Jim Henson. Here, let me show you.

Read the full article at We Almost Didn’t Have the Muppets: Four Alternate Points in Jim Henson’s Life | Tor.com.

(I’ve closed comments here to encourage folks to comment over there, instead. And please do! I want to know what you think and so does Tor.com)

I’ve just come out of the audition for Madame Butterfly. I was cut in the first round, which is disappointing — I won’t even pretend that it’s not — but not particularly crushing. The thing about auditions like this is that they are such a long shot anyway. You don’t go in expecting to get the part, you know? It was a really good set of puppeteers and frankly, I didn’t show well.

So, what does an audition like this look like?

It was a little different from the last one. There were only a dozen of us, which is pretty amazing to start with. We were led up the elevator to what felt like the bowels of the Met but is actually the top floor. Totally feels like a basement, though. The last time, we’d been on a replica of the stage, with the actual set. This time was in a rehearsal room

The puppeteers all sort of stretch out while we’re waiting. This is part getting the body ready, part showing off flexibility, and part distracting oneself from nerves.

They started by just having us move around the room to get comfortable with the space and with each other. The goal with these moments is to see how well we move and also to start building teamwork. Since the puppet is worked by three operators, this is vital.

Once we’d warmed up, they started having us work the puppet in teams. The first team up was really good. I mean… frequently that is not the case, but they’d already narrowed the selection. I think all of us sort of internally went, “Oh, crap.” Or maybe that was just me.

Then the team rotates so that each person gets to try a different position on the puppet.

When my turn came, having watched the others, I volunteered to do the feet first. With the other teams, as they rotated, the puppet director had the puppet try faster things so the last person on the feet kept winding up running. I’m no dummy. I did not want to have to do that without practice.

I had fully expected the feet to be my worst position, because I have the wrong body type. Since the figure is direct manipulation and worked on the floor, this requires the puppeteer to hold the feet and work in a squatting posture. In the show, the puppet runs 60 feet down a raked stage.  For this particular figure, you want short legs and a long torso so you can really stretch out in front of you. I have long legs and short torso. My knees get in my way.

And yet, that was the position that I was strongest in. I had good placement and stride. I planted fully and showed weight.

Then we rotated. I was fine on the torso and right hand. Nothing special but nothing broken, either.

Then we rotated. On the head I made such a basic mistake that I’m sort of horrified. I checked the range of motion on the other body parts, but I did not check where the puppet’s focus was — where its eye level is when it looks straight ahead — before we started. It was much, much higher than I thought. So my puppet spent the entire time staring at the ground. I also verbally coached my teammates, which, in hindsight, I shouldn’t have done. It’s a trick we use in rehearsal, but in this audition, they were looking for non-verbal communication. I also, didn’t do a particularly good job of countering, that is keeping sightlines clear. So, as I said, I did not show well.

By the way, this is the performer’s version of rejectomancy.

I want to be clear, for people who aren’t used to theater, that I do not feel sorry for myself. It’s also not false modesty or downplaying things to say that I didn’t show well. I’m a really good puppeteer. I know what I’m capable of and I didn’t deliver today.

The last thing they had us do was cross the stage floor in a gliding walk. It’s a very stylized movement that stagehands use in bunraku. I have no idea how I did there, since there weren’t mirrors.

They sent us all out in the hall while they conferred for five minutes and then brought us back in. They read the names of the six people they were keeping. While I hoped I was wrong, I was not surprised when mine wasn’t one of them.

It was a great experience overall. So often, productions think they can just teach anyone to work puppets and it is wonderful to see them take puppetry seriously. It’s also really nice to spend an afternoon watching a whole bunch of really good puppeteers do their work.

And at the end of the day? I got to audition for the Met. Twice. How many people get to say that?

I caught a redeye from Salt Lake City to NYC where I will be until Friday morning. Why? Because I’m clearly insane.

In all seriousness, I have an audition tomorrow. For the Met.

I’ve been called back for a show I auditioned for four years ago. You can read about that audition and I’ll tell you about tomorrow’s once I get on the other side of it.

How do I think I’ll do? Impossible to say. They are looking at a lot of puppeteers tomorrow. As much depends on body type as skillset for this role. Am I nervous? Yes.

But… it’s the Met. Just being able to say the sentence, “I’m auditioning for the Met” is incredibly, amazingly, cool.

One more time.

I’m auditioning for the Met.

Edited to add: I had a great time, didn’t get the part, and you can read how the audition went.

Rob and I had to go out of town this weekend and I was struck by how many of the  places we visited had a touring memory attached to them.  I played in elementary schools all over the place and we were very much in my old stomping grounds this weekend.

At one point, we needed to get diesel for the car and Rob said that he thought he’d wait until we exited for our next turn. I thought that there weren’t any options at that exit — and I was right. It was weird.

If you were in elementary school in Washington or Oregon in 1995-97 or in Idaho in 1993-1995 or 1998, then  I almost certainly performed for you. It is a little awkward how many adults I run across that have memories of seeing me perform or rather of seeing the shows that I performed.

We are on the road to Reno! The puppeteers, (Lance and Jodi) and I left yesterday afternoon after rehearsal.  We’ll be performing on Friday at the convention.

Normally, I only post the public things on my schedule, but this time I’ve included things like rehearsals and SFWA board meetings so you can see why the chances of spotting me on the floor of the con are very slim.

Wednesday

• Teaching SF: Give the Kid a Book (Workshop), Wed 14:00 – 15:00, A18 (RSCC)
• Giving an Effective Reading (Workshop), Wed 15:00 – 16:00, A17 (RSCC)
• Puppet Show Rehearsal (Rehearsal), Wed 19:00 – 21:00, A17 (RSCC)

Thursday

• Sketching Your Costume Idea (Workshop), Thu 11:00 – 12:00, A12 (RSCC)
• Autographing: Thu 13:00 (Autographing), Thu 13:00 – 14:00, Hall 2 Autographs (RSCC)
• Reading: Mary Robinette Kowal (Reading), Thu 15:00 – 15:30, A14 (RSCC)
• Writing Excuses Podcast (Panel), Thu 17:00 – 19:00, D05 (RSCC)
• Shadow Puppetry (Demonstration) (M), Thu 20:00 – 21:00, Hall 2 Demo2 (RSCC)

Friday

• SFWA Board Meeting (Special Interest Group), Fri 08:00 – 12:00, OFFSITE (OFFSITE)
• Puppet Show – Set-up/Rehearsal (Rehearsal), Fri 12:00 – 15:30, C01 (RSCC)
• Puppet Show (first showing): Whatnot (Performance), Fri 16:00 – 17:30, C01 (RSCC)
• Puppet Show – Break (RESET), Fri 17:30 – 18:30, C01 (RSCC)
• Puppet Show (second showing): Whatnot (Performance), Fri 19:00 – 20:30, C01 (RSCC)

Saturday

• The Image of Art in SF: How Art and Artists are Depicted in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Panel), Sat 10:00 – 11:00, A01+6 (RSCC)
• Historical Figures in Action! (Panel), Sat 11:00 – 12:00, A10 (RSCC)
• SFWA Meeting (Special Interest Group), Sat 13:00 – 15:00, A02 (RSCC)
• Art Direction: What’s Involved? (Panel) (M), Sat 15:00 – 16:00, A04 (RSCC)
• Pre-Hugo Reception (Reception) (I), Sat 18:00 – 20:00, Capri (Peppermill)

This is what I made today.

Teeth!

They are made of medical grade thermal plastic and individually placed in Papa Fuzzy’s mouth.

Basically, I cut a tiny piece of thermal plastic and lower it into boiling water with a slotted spoon. I pull it out to shape it using a flat surface and a scoring tool (my fingernail).

For the molars, I shaped two pieces of the plastic and stacked them to get the width I wanted.

You can juuuuust barely see his tongue in this shot.

I’m particularly happy with the molar, but I may wind up not making any more than that.  I just want the hint of white when he opens his mouth and having a full set of teeth might break the “cute” aspect of him. Although I’m using ecru thermal plastic, it’s still a little stark for his mouth.

You might have to be a puppeteer to find this hilarious. Rest assured, that it is.

I’ve been playing with Google+ since they opened it up for field testing and I’m really liking it.  With Buzz and Wave, I was hopeful but neither of them filled a need for me. Wave came closer to working for me but… Google+ is hitting at a time when I’m annoyed by Facebook and wanting a replacement. I’m finding it easier to carry on a conversation there.  Even easier than my own blog, to be honest.

But the thing I really, truly love are the hangouts.  This is basically video chatting, but I can put up a public hangout and anyone can join in OR I can limit it to a specific group of people.  It’s kind of awesome that way.

So far, I’ve been inviting people to hangout while I build puppets.  Today I have some writing to do, and so I’m having a writers’ hangout.  I’ve played with this a little on other days and it’s kind of like hanging out at a coffee shop but I get to bring my own cats and don’t have to worry about what part of the world the other writers are in.

So… if you are on Google+ today,  I’m going to try Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s method of writing dates.  We’ll chat for fifteen minutes. Then at quarter past we’ll start writing for forty-five minutes. On the hour, there’s another 15 minute break for chat… Rinse and repeat.

I don’t know about you, but I have some page count to get done and having folks around makes it easier to not get distracted by my sudden pressing need to vacuum the cat.

So if you are on Google+ drop in and hangout.

[Edited to add: I'm taking a break, but hopefully we'll do more later. I got a lot of writing done.]

This has been a fun week. Among other things, Eric Wright was in town.  Eric is one of the founders of The Puppet Kitchen in NYC and a dear friend. While he was here, he taught a puppet workshop at the Cast Iron Carousel.

The workshop was on making these tiny little hand puppets which are great for travel or just to have around. The Pup-It workshop was two-hours long and everyone made ridiculously cute puppets. RIDICULOUS.  The Puppet Kitchen teaches workshops in NYC, so allow me to recommend them.

It’s been ages since I made a puppet just for fun and this was a nice break. I also learned some new tricks, which is always nice.

While I wish he’d been in town longer, I did manage to get Eric to Powell’s City of Books and Voodoo Donuts.

Hey gang, I just found out that there are still openings in the Pup-It workshop tomorrow in Portland. If you have the time and are interested in puppet construction, I highly, highly, highly recommend this workshop.

Eric Wright, one of the three head chefs from New York City’s The Puppet Kitchen, is visiting the Portland Puppet scene for a weekend of workshops. Come on over to Cast Iron Carousel to participate in a Pup-It Workshop.

Each Pup-It Workshop involves two hours of hands-on instruction with Mr. Wright. He will also provide you with the materials, the patterns, and the know how — basically everything you need to design and build your own Pup-it Puppet.

To see some of our Pup-its in action, check out this Channel 7 exclusive with Lauren Glassberg: http://abclocal.go.com/wab?c/story?section=news%2Floc?al&id=7564658

The Puppet Kitchen Pup-its are excellent moving mouth or “lip-synch” puppets. They are perfect for beginners, or anyone looking to pick up a puppet making trick or two. (you’ll find they’re perfect for web videos, dinner parties, even complex Shakespearean recitation.)

Ages 10 through Adult are encouraged. Scissors and hot glues are used so please if younger guest would like to attend, please email us and be prepared to have a guardian in attendance.

The price is $50 per 2 hr session. Each session will result in a completed functional puppet. Reservations Required: email us at workshops@puppetkitchen.co?m, with the subject line “Portland Workshop”

Workshop Dates: July 8th & 9th, 2011 at 1 p.m. class size is limited to 10; reserve your Pup-It now!

As part of the show that my puppet company is taking to WorldCon, we promised that we’d create a new piece specifically for the event. For that, we need a little input. We need your favorite lines from science-fiction, fantasy and the related genres. No promises that we’ll use all of them, but we need a good sampling.

So, here’s a form you can fill out to tell us your favorite line of dialogue or narration.

What will we do with them? Imagine a scene constructed entirely out of the lines you love.

If you want to see what other people are suggesting, you can see the list online. Oh, and just because someone else has suggested a line, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t suggest it, too. Nothing wrong with knowing a line is popular.

Technically, Friday was the first day of the con but since I got here on Thursday it feels like Day 2 for me.

We started with the opening ceremonies which were short and simple. The various GoH’s introduced themselves and said, “hello” to the audience. Martin Young, the Toastmaster, gave me the straight line of asking if things ever went wrong in puppetry, so I told the Sleeping Beauty story.

Sandra Tayler is in town and rooming with me. She is a delight to hang out with.  By the way, I highly recommend having someone like Sandra with you when you GoH to act as a safety net.

From the Opening Ceremonies it was off to Getting Published Today with Dani Kollin, Eytan Kollin, and Susan Krinard.  Oddly we were all Tor authors whose surnames began with the letter K.  It was a fun conversation although at one point I remarked that we were a self-heckling panel.  The key takeaway I think from that is that if you want to get published you have to have a good manuscript and do your research.

Between panels Sandra and I hung out in the bar area with John Picacio, Chris Garcia, Jeremy Llassen, and a roving cast of others. Funny conversations including a whole host of innocent sentences parents should not say about their children without risking jail time if they are heard out of context.

In the evening we went to the Meet the Guests reception which was good clean fun. I need to give a shout out to Tobi Schneider, guest liaison, who is doing a fantastic job of making us all feel welcome.

After the reception, I indulged in my guilty pleasure and went to the Regency Ball. I brought an extra dress and managed to talk Sandra into going. Man, some of those dances are really fast. At one point, I lost a shoe. I felt very much like Cinderella.

Here’s where you can find me today (Saturday)

11:30 AM to 1:00 PM in room: San Tomas
Growing Artisticially Through Crisis

1:00 PM to 2:30 PM in room: Bayshore East and West
Puppetry Workshop
(Note: I will have the pencil-necked little weasel, and John Scalzi’s Papa Fuzzy puppet with me)

4:00 PM to 5:30 PM in room: Winchester
$5, a Dead Fish, and a Time Machine

5:30 to 7:00 PM in room: Central
Autographing

By the way, if I’m not in a panel, the bar is a good bet on where to find me.

I’m hopping on a train to Santa Clara TODAY for BayCon, where I’m one of their Guests of Honor.  I’m looking forward to seeing the always fantastic art Goh John Picacio and to meeting Fan GoH Bobbie DuFault and Toastmaster Martin Young.

I’ve got my schedule below, but wanted to point out a couple of things.

1. At the puppetry workshop, I’ll have the Pencil-necked Little Weasel AND Papa Fuzzy.
2. For my reading, I’ll read some published work PLUS an excerpt from my WIP novel AND a tiny little puppet show.
3. There are two Regency dances on the schedule. I’m hoping to attend both.

Hope to see you there!

Friday

2:00 PM to  2:30 PM in room: Winchester
Opening Ceremonies
Let’s get the Carnivale started! Join the BayCon Chairman and our Honored Guests as they get the convention started.

4:00 PM to 5:30 PM in room: Lawrence
Getting Published Today
How do I get my career to take off in the era of shrinking midlist and self-publishing?

8:00 PM to 9:00 PM in room: Grand Ballroom E & F
Meet-the-Guests Reception
Come meet the Master of the Carnivale, BayCon 2011 Chairman Robert Toland. Mingle with our guests as our Toastmaster Martin Young regales us with interesting anecdotes and introduces our Guests of Honor.

Saturday

11:30 AM to 1:00 PM in room: San Tomas
Growing Artisticially Through Crisis
A discussion of how the traumas and tragedies can influence your art.

1:00 PM to 2:30 PM in room: Bayshore East and West
Puppetry Workshop
Learn more about puppetry from our Writer Guest of Honor, Mary Robinette Kowal. (Note: I will have the pencil-necked little weasel, and John Scalzi’s Papa Fuzzy puppet with me)

4:00 PM to 5:30 PM in room: Winchester
$5, a Dead Fish, and a Time Machine
Do-it-yourself alternate history. What if you were given three items? Where would you go back to, what would you change, what trouble would you make? What memes would you (re)start?

Sunday

10:00 AM to 11:30 AM in room: San Tomas
Make It or Break It: The First Three Pages
Everyone knows you have to grab the editors attention enough in the first page to get them to turn the page.  So what’s the secret?  And what about the next two pages?

1:00 PM to 2:30 PM in room: Grand Ballroom E & F
Interview: Writer Guest of Honor
Join Kimmi Albee as she interviews our Writer Guest of Honor, Mary Robinette Kowal.  Discover how Mary blends her award-winning writing with her award-winning puppetry.  What’s with her collection of manual typewriters anyway?

2:30 PM to 4:00 PM in room: Alameda
Author GoH Reading
Please come join Mary Robinette Kowal in a reading of her stories. (Note: I’m going to read a couple of things including a bit from my new novel)

4:00 PM to Sunday, May 29  5:30 PM in room: Grand Ballroom E & F
Social Media and Creativity
How can you use social media to increase your productivity? How does it make you feel more connected without being overly intrusive? How have social media affected your creativity, both positively and negatively?

Monday

11:30 AM to 1:00 PM in room: Stevens Creek
The Single Book That Most Influenced Your Writing
Every writer has a style, developed and polished over time.  Our panelists discuss the single book, or author, that most influenced their writing style.

4:00 PM to 4:30 PM in room: Winchester
Closing Ceremonies
Join our Guests of Honor as we bid a fond farewell to BayCon 2011!

Those folks who have been following me on Twitter, have probably seen some particularly gruesome puppet building posts.  I haven’t told anyone what I’ve been building because it was SECRET.

Now I can tell you.  Last night, I went to Seattle to John Scalzi’s reading as one of the surprise guests he’d promised for this leg of the tour.  I built a puppet of Papa Fuzzy from his book Fuzzy Nation.

Here are is the first post with much delayed process shots.

For most puppets, I start by doing design sketches, but for this one Scalzi asked me to make it look as much like the Fuzzy on the cover as possible.

So,  I started by doing a full-scale drawing of the figure, with lightly sketched notes about where I thought my arm would go.  The novel says that Papa Fuzzy was the size of a large Maine Coon, which meant that he’d be 2.5 to 3 feet tall.  Using the painting by Kekai Kotaki as my guide, I worked out the proportions of Papa.  His body is four and a half heads tall, if you are interested.  Once I’d drawn how big he was with fur, I went back and drew a line to represent his body, minus fur. You’ve seen a wet cat, right?  

This drawing also allowed me to order the eyes. The drawing gave me a diameter of about 32mm and I went up to the next size to make sure I had a good fit up front.  A week after I ordered them, I called to see where they were. They were out of stock and hadn’t shipped yet.  This would have been useful information, earlier.  We wound up rounding up again, and they over-nighted 36mm eyes. Again, for the curious, these are “competition-quality” bobcat eyes. Here they are with Harriet for scale.

With the eyes in hand, I sculpted a face out of water-based clay.  You don’t have to use water-based clay, I just like it.

Because I know that the fur will mute a lot of the features, I exaggerated them somewhat.  The ears are just rough pieces of clay  for reference. You can see the calipers, under my sculpting wheel,  which I use to double-check dimensions as I work.

I made a two-part plaster mold of the Fuzzy’s head and then papier-mached into it.  Even though I planned on making the lower jaw out of foam, I still made it in mache so I had it for size reference.

While the Fuzzy dried, I clipped the two sides together so that they wouldn’t warp.  Then I mached the interior seam and trimmed the excess off.

While that was drying, I worked on the body. Using scrap foam, I roughed out the torso, then made a pattern for it, that regularized the two sides.

The darts are to make the foam curve where I want it to.

My first draft was too small, to get my arm through because I’d forgotten to account for the thickness of the foam when I’d done my scale drawing. Easy to fix, fortunately, by just cutting another slightly larger.

This is what I affectionaly call,  Robo-fuzzy. It’s the puppet’s armature without any of the flesh or skin in place.

The arms are simple closed-cell foam, carved into the shape I wanted. The elbows use athletic-bandage for the joint, adhered with 3m-77 spray adhesive.

If you try this, make sure the stretch rusn perpendicular to the arm, not parallel.  That way the arm won’t separate and you can deploy the stretch for a little bit of extra arm rotation.

The legs, feet, and hip-plate are plywood. The thigh and feet are a single thickness, but the calves are a triple thickness, with the middle piece acting as a spacer.

I use the same foam for the legs that I used for the arms, but the arms have no internal armature.

I first rough cut the legs then sliced them down the middle so that I could put a piece on either side of the wooden bones.

You can see that I cut out channels in the foam so that when it is all assembled the wood is completely encased. To assemble it I used hotglue on the wood of the legs and then heat welded the two sides of the leg together.

The joints are simple bolts, washers and lock-nuts.

The legs attach to the hips with braided dacron fishing line.

I trimmed everything on the body using scissors or the belt-sander to get the right shape.  Over the foam, I put a skin of brown spandex with the asisatance of Sandra Tayler on all the hand-stitching. There are three reasons to add a skin.

1. Makes the foam more durable.
2. Allows the fur to slide over the body, giving a little more flexibility.
3. There are some places where I’ll have to slit fur to get more freedom of movement. this will make sure that glaring white foam, like bone, doesn’t stick out.

I’ve put fur on the head and arm and you can see the HUGE difference it makes in size.

In fact when I first put fur on Papa’s face, it looked very much like a tribble.

There are nine different pieces of fur on his face, to accommodate the different directions that his fur grows.  Fur is relatively forgiving about hiding seams, which is good.

The eyes are actually installed in this photo, you just can’t see them. At all.

I used scissors and a razor to shave the fur and start to get it into the right shape.

I don’t like the hands I made, so I’ll blog about hands and feet after I get back from the Nebulas. Meanwhile, here is a photo of the Fuzzy at John Scalzi’s event. The photo below is by Jeff Slostad and is reprinted with his permission. I haven’t finished the detail work on the face, but I got it to the point of being presentable.

Photo by Jeff Slostad

So far the puppet has about 45 hours of work, and I’m guessing I have between 8 to 20 left, depending on what goes wrong. Something always goes wrong.

It’s nice to see a puppet wrangler get her due.  The LA Times has an article about the wrangler who maintains the Beaver puppet in The Beaver.

The new film “The Beaver” stars Mel Gibson as a mentally ill man who begins to speak through a battered hand puppet that he retrieves from a dumpster in a moment of despair. Although the controversial star made a point to puppeteer the beaver himself, on the set, puppet wrangler Anney McKilligan Ozar was tasked with grooming the creature’s fur and even brushing its prominent teeth.

Read the full article Working Hollywood: Puppet master reveals her secrets for ‘The Beaver’ – Los Angeles Times.

As one of the rewards for our Kickstarter campaign to take our puppet play “Whatnot” to WorldCon, I’m offering an unpublished short story.  This is exclusively available to our donors, whether we make our funding goal or not.

All you have to do is donate, and the story will be visible to you. Even if we don’t reach our funding goal, you still get to read the story.

Here’s a teaser.

Trip, Trap, Tripping

by Mary Robinette Kowal

 

The heat rose off the sidewalks and crept down the walls; it wound down to the basement and clung with sticky fingers to Clef Troll’s skin. He grimaced as he tightened a pipe on his sink.

Through the pipe, came a constant syncopated rhythm. Occasionally the rat-ta-tat-tat would pause long enough for him to think it was over but then the tapping began again. He crawled out from under the sink and poked his head into the front room. The tapping was louder there.

He glared at the ceiling. Dammit all. He thought he’d left that behind with the stupid goats and the bridge.

 

Since I know you like process shots, I took pictures the other day when I was hastily constructing the pencil-necked little weasel.  For those who missed the whole thing, a politician in Minnesota called multiple-award winning author Neil Gaiman a pencil-necked little weasel, accused him of being a thief and said that he hated him. It was very grade-school. But it prompted lots of joking about pencil-necked little weasels. Paul Cornell suggest that I should make one. It didn’t take much to make me head down to the basement. I started with a rough side view on paper to get the scale right.

Then I wadded up a ball of tinfoil around a pencil for the head. Note: I’m taking a billion shortcuts making this.

I used plumber’s epoxy to build up eyes and a basic face structure.  The pencil that is sticking out of the tinfoil will eventually become the pencil-necked little weasel’s nose. After this photo, I went back and added a more defined snout.  Once the epoxy was set, I painted the eyes with black acrylic and a gloss gel medium.

I rolled a tube of fur from a scrap of white fake fur I had in the basement and whip-stitched the back onto it.

Weasels, just so you know, are basically a tube of fur with a head and tiny little legs.

I considered glue, because I was building fast, but decided not to cheat that much because it would have made the tube too stiff.  I did glue fur to the head, however, because that wasn’t going to require any flexibility.

This is the head in the pre-trimmed state, and looks like a giant ball of fuzz, with an eraser sticking out of it.

Here I’m double-checking the length of the neck pencil against the drawing. It’s just glued into the fur at top and bottom, which gives a little bit of flexibility.

If I were building this for real, I would have built a slightly more robust neck joint.

The legs are just fur and hot glue for structure. Neat trick: you can use hotglue to deliberately stiffen fabric or leather by flooding an area with glue and then molding it into shape as it cools.  Makes great noses that way.

And here’s the finished pencil-necked little weasel, complete with eraser nose and pencil tail.

This was a fun thing to make.

If I’d planned for this to be a puppet, I would have put a control rod on the thing somewhere. The smart thing to do would have been to run the snout pencil all the way out the back of the head and use that as a control.

Ah well. It’s a cute toy and was a great deal of fun to make.

Also, it justified those scraps of fur I’ve been keeping in our storage locker.

Help me, Bio Wan. You’re my only hope.

I’ve been asked to write a longform bio for BayCon, where I will be Guest of Honor at the end of the month. (Please come!) Writing bios gives me a sad face.  They’ve asked for something 300-500 words long. I’ve just carved a 390 out of granite with my bare fingers — not really. That would have been easier.

What would you like to know that isn’t included? What is boring?

Mary Robinette Kowal is a novelist and professional puppeteer. In 2008 she won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her debut novel Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor 2010) was nominated for the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Novel. Two of her short fiction works have been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story: “Evil Robot Monkey” in 2009 and “For Want of a Nail” in 2011. Her stories have appeared inStrange Horizons, Asimov’s, and several Year’s Best anthologies as well as in her collection Scenting the Dark and Other Storiesfrom Subterranean Press.

Kowal  began puppetry in high school as a hobby but didn’t think it was something that anyone could do for a living. While in college at East Carolina University, pursuing an art degree with a minor in theater and speech, she had the opportunity to perform Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors. A professional puppeteer came to see the show. Kowal says, “It never occurred to me before that this was something you could get paid for.” She changed career choices and went on to intern at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, GA. With twenty years of experience, she has performed for LazyTown (CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, Jim Henson Pictures and founded Other Hand Productions. Her designs have garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve.

She also works as a voice actor recording fiction for authors such as Kage Baker, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi. Kowal describes voice acting as, “Puppetry, without the pain.”

Although she wrote in high school and college, Kowal set it aside for over ten years putting her creative energy into her puppetry career. She began writing again when her brother moved to China with his children. As a way to stay connected to her niece and nephew, Kowal wrote a serial for them. Reminded of how much she enjoyed writing, she began submitting short stories and made her first sale in 2005 with her first professional sale in 2006 to Strange Horizons.

She is serving her second term as the Vice President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Mary lives in Portland, OR with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters. Sometimes she even writes on them. Visit www.maryrobinettekowal.com.

Edited to add: Thanks to all the helpful input I have sent a long-form bio off to the BayCon program book editors.

Guest post by Rob Kimbro

We opened Odd and the Frost Giants on Tuesday morning with a great show in front of a wonderful crowd from Briscoe Jr. High.  This morning we had our first elementary-age audience – 150 or so first graders.  Definitely a different energy with that age.  Various jokes and moments in the show work differently.  The older crowds love it when the Frost Giant, disguised as a beautiful maid, tricks Loki into stealing Mjolnir for him.  The younger group loved it when Thor declares that the animals couldn’t have been arguing “because we can’t talk! . . . Oops.”  Every audience so far has loved the puppets.  You can hear the excitement when they appear at curtain call.  (Each puppet gets a quick bow, followed by a bow from the actor.)  We’re looking forward to the first all-ages show tomorrow afternoon.

If you’re in the Houston area, there are still tickets available for all three public performances.  You can get them on Stages’ website.  If Houston’s a bit too far away, please feel free to mention the show to your local young audiences theatre companies.  I’d love to see this script done other places.  And, in the meantime, here’s a gallery of photos from dress rehearsal and one from after today’s performance, when a young audience member got to chat a bit with the bear.

-Rob Kimbro, director/adapter of Odd and the Frost Giants

I realized that I talk about our cats Harriet and Marlowe quite a bit but that I’ve never introduced you to our pencil-necked little weasel. Here’s a photo of him lounging with Harriet in the sun.

His name is Neil and he’s an exceptionally friendly and intelligent pencil-necked little weasel.  While he can be a little grumpy in the morning he’s quite playful the rest of the day.

Now, I do want to point out that he is a pencil-necked little weasel as opposed to his cousin the pencil-necked greater weasel which is native to Argentina.  The primary difference is in the length of their necks.

In this closeup, you can see that Neil has quite a short neck. While the pencil-necked greater weasel has a larger body-mass, the longer neck means that they aren’t as good in a fight.

The pencil-necked little weasels, on the other hand, are incredibly good at taking down snakes in the grass.  They have a ferocious bite when provoked.

Friendly and curious fellows, the pencil-necked little weasel is also handy to have around the house when you need to compose a shopping list.  Most of the pencil-necked little weasels are quite good writers.  This photo is from one of Neil’s competitions where he won best in show.

We are very proud and fond of our pencil-necked little weasel.

As part of the Kickstarter campaign to get our puppet company to WorldCon, I will do the occasional blog post to explain what the prizes are, or to talk about the show.

This is cross-posted from Kickstarter to talk about the $25 reward, which are hand-crafted puppet faces.

Thank you so much to those of you who have already pitched in. Since some of you have opted for the paper mask option, I thought I’d explain what exactly that will be.?

So, look. Renovation has invited my puppet company to perform at Worldcon.  They don’t have the budget to bring us there.  I’ll already be there, but it’s a three person show and puppet shows are expensive.

But we’ve been given a blessing to run a Kickstarter campaign to get there

Not only do you have the opportunity to fund an award-winning puppet company, but should this succeed, you’ll also get to see the VP of SFWA in a white spandex bodysuit. Yeah… That’s right. We perform this show in white spandex. Spandex. Bodysuit.

Also, puppets. Lots of puppets.

We have nifty rewards! Please help send Other Hand Productions to Worldcon.

I wish I were in Houston with the rest of the Odd and the Frost Giant team, but director Rob Kimbro has some photos to with you.

Too tired to provide any sort of commentary or context here other than to say that we have dress rehearsal tomorrow and the first student matinee Tuesday morning.

Since he’s wiped out, I’m going to just write down my reactions to the photos. This is the first time I’m seeing them too. SO excited!

First up, the Wall at Asgard

To which I say, yowza, that’s some gorgeous forced perspective there. The hand also looks amazing. That’s when the wall turns into the giant. Such a cool idea.

The Gods and Odd

This is the first time I’ve gotten to see Mimir’s well/the fire pit. It looks wonderful.  I really like how everything is playing with the wood floor.  The costumes are great and really make the puppets pop. I was a little worried that they would compete for attention, but they don’t at all.

The visions at Mimir’s well.

I think what we’re looking at is Odd’s vision at Mimir’s well of his parents. There’s the small carving his father did (actually done by Jodi Bobrovsky, prop master) and then a larger full costume duplicate. Which is AMAZING. That looks so good, guys.

This is Odd and his mother after his leg is damaged. The colors are really gorgeous.  I’ll bet this is a beautiful scene.

Dave Farland has these very cool conference calls through his Authors’ Advisory, where folks can call in and talk to an author. Tonight it is me!  At 8:45 EST, I’ll be talking about the Long and the Short of Fiction.  Or puppets! Or SFWA.  Ask away.

You can get instructions on how to call in via Farland’s Authors’ Advisory Conference Calls.

Hope to talk to you soon.

(P.S. Sorry for the short notice. I thought I had posted it already but had saved it as draft.)

While Mary’s off in Seattle, I thought I’d offer up a little content from Houston  – a peek at Odd and the Frost Giants rehearsals as we approach our May 3 opening.  Or, more accurately,  a peek at a photo shoot we did for the Free Press Houston last night before working on the first half of the show.

Loki’s costume was the most finished, so we shot Loki/Odd stuff.  Odin and I took these photos as the professional photographer was setting up and doing his thing.

Conveniently, I’ve just added a post about Loki over on the Stages education blog – including my retelling of the story of how Asgard’s Wall was built and how Odin got his unusual steed.

We’ve missed Mary in rehearsal this week – it was so much fun working on puppets together last week.  But the cast continues to do great work.  I found myself last night giving notes directly to the bear.  He took them, too.  We’ve got massive technical rehearsals coming up on Sunday and Monday and then a slightly more relaxed few days of rehearsal while the show that makes up the other half of the rep previews and opens.  Then a little brush-up tech and dress and the first student groups arrive on May 3.

A reminder for those of you in the Houston area.  There are only 3 public performances – May 7, 14, and 21 at 2pm.  The rest of the shows are 10am weekday matinees for school groups and homeschoolers.  Tickets are on sale now at 713.527.0123 or on the Stages website.  If you’re interested in coming to a student matinee, contact Eva LaPorte at 713.527.0220 x223 or elaporte@stagestheatre.com
-Rob Kimbro, director of Odd and the Frost Giants

One of puppetry’s greats passed away this weekend, Albrecht Roser.  In the puppetry community the term Master Puppeteer is used sparingly, but Albrecht was a master. The things this man could do with a puppet would leave you breathless. I think seeing him perform his stork marionette at the Center for Puppetry Arts was the first time I wept because of the sheer beauty of manipulation.

I had the great fortune to train with Albrecht at the National Puppetry Conference back in 1994.  That’s Albrecht gesturing at a giant head out of paper that he made for an adaptation of A Soldier’s Tale.  I’m the very young woman seated with the bowed instrument.

Many of you have seen the paper-folding technique that I use with many of my puppets. Most recently, I tweaked it to work with wood veneer for Odd and the Frost Giants. I learned it from Albrecht and Ingrid at this workshop.

He invented the technique, as I recall, during WWII as a way to continue making puppets with wartime shortages.  This was not a man who would stop creating.

He was vibrant and enthusiastic about his art form and generous. Oh, but he was generous in teaching and in life. To say that Albrecht had a profound influence on my career would be to undervalue his gift.

Albrecht Roser, you will be sorely missed.

Below is the English translation (by Robin Walsh) of the press release of his passing.

On the death of Prof. Albrecht Roser, May 21, 1922 – April 17, 2011

His last show, in July 2008 in his atelier theatre in Buoch was a high point. Then he had a stroke, from which he was unable to recover. A well grounded artist, a philosopher, a poet, an amazing puppet maker, an unequaled puppeteer – he died on Palm Sunday at age 88.

Born in Friedrichshafen and raised in the Schwabish town of Stuttgart, he spent four years in Russia during the war. He returned to civilian life as a outwardly uninjured 23 year old and began a years long search to find a sense, a reason for his survival.   His meeting with a marionette, a witch, and his later study in marionette construction with Fritz Herbert Bross would become an key experience. Dead material changed itself on stage into wonderful Life.

Bross gave his entire knowledge and discoveries to his 29 year old student. Then Clown Gustaf sprang into being and made Roser, through his inexhaustible personality, surprisingly into a puppeteer. He was Roser’s alter ego, his mentor, his guide, his inspiration on stage from 1951 to 2008. There is nothing equivalent in the world of puppet theatre. The public was enchanted for 57 years, at this wonderful art of the performance of life.

Roser traveled for decades through many continents with Gustaf and his Ensemble, as a messenger for the art of marionettes.  The Ensemble played in Germany not only in theaters, but also for companies and universities. Famous parts of the Ensemble include “The Frog Concert,” “The Stork on his Morning Stroll,” “Clown Puenktchen and his Happiness,” “The Beauty of the Night.” The final part of the show, the Oma from Stuttgart, the schwaebish grandmother who always knew exactly what was up, was the greatest attraction. She spoke all languages with a familiar accent, in Europe as well as in Asia.

In a Zen monastery in Kyoto there was an exchange between a Roser marionette and a Noh mask, a gem that for Roser became a gauge for his own work. America fascinated him for its openess for the unusual. Roser was invited by the University of  Connecticut for a 6 month guest professorship. This led to his International Summer Academies that occurred in various countries, to his Master classes and his setting up the Study of Figure  theatre at the Hochschule for Music and Art in Stuttgart in 1983. Also there, for over 20 years, he built up the FITS Figure theatre with Stuttgart puppeteers.

His various puppet films and puppet television were shown on SDR television for over 30 years. Roser created “The Raven Dance” and, for the European Music Festival of the Bach Acadamie, the “Gluck’schen Don Juan.”

In the last years he pulled back to his atelier theatre. The performances there were mostly sold out and the public loved the workshop atmosphere, and he loved his public in all worlds.

In Roser’s own words:
“So have I searched my entire life to serve, to serve Joy. It was a wonderful, well loved and well lived Life – full of everything that belongs to Life, in no way easy, full to the brim with work, that also in its way brought with it joy.”

MEMORIAL on 30th of April, 2011 at 3:00 pm
in the Church of St. Sebastian in Remshalden-Buoch

I’m heading home after a very productive week working on Odd and the Frost Giants for Stages Theater in Houston.  I should note that if you want to see the show, most of the performances are for schools.

There are only three public performances.  It’s a small theater and I suspect the show will sell out. I’d recommend getting tickets early.

I alternated between doing finish work on the puppets during the day and rehearsal with the cast in the evening.  I’m very proud of the work the cast put in.

They had never worked puppets before and were really game about trying things.  We started with a very fast puppetry 101 session and then started working on how to use body language to express.

The rest of the week we worked specific scenes, refining their movement choices.  As the week progressed it was exciting to see them begin to apply the physical vocabulary from one scene into others.

As you can see, the puppets are very different in how they work, although they all use the same principles of puppetry to communicate through movement.  The biggest challenge at the beginning was getting them to take risks. They were afraid that they would break the puppets. By the end of the week, Thor was chasing Loki around the stage.

As I said, I’m very proud of them.

I think it is going to be a darn fine show and encourage anyone within driving distance to head over to see it.

I will do process posts when I get home. Promise.  Right now though I have a small invitation for folks based in Houston.

Would you like to come see puppets Thursday?

I can host a small group (no more than 5 to 10 people)  for about forty-five minutes at 4:30. After that, I have to go into a production meeting.

So if you are curious about what I’ve been building for Odd and the Frost Giants, RSVP in the comments on my website.  I will email you with instructions on where to come.

Thor’s construction for Odd and the Frost Giants is much like Loki’s but he is much, much bigger.

Here is the “skin” for his face cut out of veneer. You can see a pair of scissors in the lower right of the frame that give a little bit of a sense of scale. Those are full size adult scissors.

He was so large, in fact, that when it was time to soak the veneer, I had to soak it in the bathtub.

The veneer is backed with paper and I’ve got him facedown in the tub, which is why the woodgrain isn’t visible.

But you see the sheer size of him, right? Huge. This made him easier and harder to deal with.

Easier because I didn’t have to ask the wood to make such tight turns. Harder because his skin just wanted to flop everywhere.

In general, the wood I was using for Thor was significantly more pliable than Loki’s. It rolled into a tube in the water, so a lot of the assembly involved fighting its urge to roll back into a tube. I wound up needing Rob to help me with assembly. I held the head and he stapled it. Even with that, I had to stuff the head to keep it the back of Thor’s skull from curving in on itself.

Thor’s skin over his body is a wool knit that I’ve been trying to shrink and felt. The idea behind the felting is to tie into the Nordic traditions of felted clothing.

Here, Harriet demonstrates how much it resembles an animal pelt.

I also liked the way it feels similar to Thor’s woodgrain. Truly, I got really lucky with this. I couldn’t have asked someone to knit something that was more perfect for the part.

And finally, here’s the completed structure for Thor’s head.

Again, Harriet assists us to demonstrate scale.

When I get to Houston, I’ll attach this to the body and install the skin as well. Once that is done, I’ll stain the head to match the skin and to emphasize the shape.

Here’s a front view, for completeness.

He’s so big and the veneer was so pliable that, there was a significant woogedie-woogedie issue at the back of his skull.  I was worried about how weak Thor was in the head, so  I papier-mached the interior of the head to reinforce the veneer.

Today I assembled Loki’s face for the Odd and the Frost Giants production and, unsurprisingly, it didn’t go well. He is the god of mischief after all.

I had the pattern that I’d worked out for the rehearsal puppets. When I cut it out of the watercolor paper, it looked slightly odd. so I decided to go ahead and assemble the face in paper to remind myself of what I’d done.

While I know that I’d made the decision to have an asymmetrical face, I was no longer happy with it so decided to balance the two sides and lay it out at a slight angle on the wood so that the grain would give the impression of a lopsided face without actually building it that way.  After I traced the main part of the face, I had some trouble getting the marks for scoring to show up. Normally, I press down on the line and it transfers to the paper.  Wood veneer is not so simple.

So I poked holes in the pattern with a small nail and then used a pencil to draw dots on the veneer.  Without the paper in place, it is easier to see what I mean about the slight angle of the grain.

Normally I score paper with a bone folder, but the woodgrain requires me to very, very lightly score the surface with an Exacto knife.  Even with that, I have to soak the skin in hot water to make it pliable enough to bend.  After the first soaking, Loki’s upper lip was too stiff to make a bend that I wanted so I had to toss him back into the water. He spent a lot of time bathing for this process.

To hold the head together, I used a combination of spring clips, tin foil and a vise.  The challenge is that while he is wet enough to bend easily, he is too wet for anything to adhere to. So I have to get him into approximately the right position and then wait for the surface to dry enough to take tape or glue but before it gets so dry that I can’t bend him.  It’s a very narrow window of time.  During the process of assembling him, I realized I’d gone through the snout with the scoring.  Although I was able to patch that spot, another tear happened on his right cheek that wasn’t repairable.

After looking at him, I think that the pattern is flawed. It’s a challenging set of folds to begin with and meant for a more pliable medium than wood veneer. I’m going to spend today working out a simpler paper pattern and then trying again with another piece of veneer.

Just by way of comparison, I worked out the pattern for Thor’s head with only two attempts. Odin’s head also took about two tries.  This will be my eighth attempt at a pattern for Loki’s head.  God of Mischief indeed.

Well, this video amused me. A lot.

The Serenading Unicorn was created by the Henson Company and performed by Allan Trautman.

via puppeteers unite

When I was starting out in puppetry I interned at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, GA.  On the wall, was a poster of a puppet from the Little Angel Theatre. I was surrounded by puppets, historic puppets, but this was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

The Center also had this fantastic library of puppetry books.  In it, I discovered Rod, Shadow and Glove: Puppets from the Little Angel Theatre which had that puppet I’d fallen in love with.  It also talked about puppetry and puppet design in ways that resonated with my own forming ideas about what one could do with the figures.

Considering that I’ve never had the opportunity to see a single show, Little Angel Theatre had a surprising impact on my development as a puppet designer.

The theatre is turning 50 this year.  There’s a wonderful article in the Guardian about the company and its founders.

A long time ago, in a land far away, there was a little girl who made puppets. “I made them myself,” recalls Lyndie Wright. “I filled my mother’s oven with papier-mache.” One day, a touring puppet company came through Pretoria, in South Africa, where the little girl lived. She went to a show and was spellbound. “There is a picture in the archives somewhere, showing me in the audience,” she says.

Read the full article The family that pulls strings at The Guardian.

(Hat tip to Marc Gascoigne)

While we were working on Loki, we kept joking that he looked like an alien caterpillar.  Here is Jodi in front of the designs for Loki holding the naked puppet.  In her right hand is the basswood control for the puppet’s head, minus the head.

Her right hand is holding his hindquarters.

The puppet has vertebra and ribs made out of a polyethelene. Rob Kimbro cut those out using the bandsaw and an electric carving knife. You know, the type for carving turkeys.

The puppet also has green crap foam. That’s a technical term meaning really cheap foam. Why? Because I had it around the basement and needed something to smooth the lines of the puppet. At one point, I tried making a simple foam body but… crap foam. It buckled unpleasantly no matter what darts and vents I put into it. Since we had spare foam from Thor we went the more labor intensive, but more graceful, route.

Each vertebra has two pieces of stout bungee running down the center, like a spinal cord. They’ve been beveled to allow free movement but they want to stay in the zero position.

Looking at the puppet’s ventral view, it’s easy to see the beveled pieces where I wanted movement. Loki has a squared off shoulder plate and two fused pieces in the hind quarters.

Along the back, we glued a piece of Ace bandage which will keep the ribs from rolling into awkward positions while not restricting other movement.

The goal is to have a range of motion that the puppet wants to do — or more specifically, a range of motion that the puppet resists doing so that is less likely to do something unnatural. By having a zero position that the puppet wants to return to, you free up part of the puppeteers brain for performance.

So much of the job involves fighting gravity in one way or another, that it’s nice when the inanimate object does as much of the job as possible. If that makes sense. So, my goal is to build a fox puppet that wants to move like a fox more than it wants to move like a poltergeist victim.

And here’s rehearsal Loki, posing for the camera.

The head and tail are made out of watercolor paper for the rehearsal period. Each one is made from a single sheet of paper, folded, cut and scored.  If we decide we want the puppet to be larger or smaller, I can easily scale the pattern up or down before transferring it to the paduak veneer that Loki’s final head will be made out of.

As you can see, the puppet is very simple to operate. There’s a rod in the head. To work the tail, one just grabs the tail and wags it.

The tail is held on with another piece of ACE bandage.

The puppet bodies are now in Houston. While Rob Kimbro rehearses with the actors, I’ll be making the final heads and the skins of the puppets.

By the way, just to be blatant about it, if you want to see this production of Odd and the Frost Giants, it’s May 2-21 at Stages Repertory Theater in Houston.

On Friday I had two visitors from Stages Repertory Theatre in Houston to take a look at the puppets for their adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants. Rob Kimbro, the director and man who did the adaptation, and Jodi Bobrovsky, the props master for Stages, came to look at the rehearsal puppets and talk about plans for moving forward.

I’d worked with Rob before at McCarter Theatre on The Tempest: A Puppet Play and he’s remained one of my favorite people to work with. Jodi and I met for the first time this weekend and seem to be kindred spirits. At one point we were comparing the various dead dogs we’ve made.

Part of the goal of the weekend was to have Rob and Jodi help with the assembly of the rehearsal puppets so that if they break in rehearsal — which they will — they had an understanding of how the puppets worked so that they could fix them.

This is the downside of working remotely. I can’t be on hand to make repairs. Having someone like Jodi there is a luxury.

Anyway. I had done drawings of everything and had the eagle ready and Loki well on his way.  Thor, on the other hand, remained a drawing on the wall AND I’d lost the pattern for his head.

Due to various time elements, I wasn’t able to pick up the foam for Thor until the morning that Rob and Jodi arrived. We all knew this was the case, but it still made me nervous.

I gave Jodi the task of taking my drawing and turning cutting everything out of the foam.  I had the side view drawn but still needed to do the top and front views. Fortunately, she’s amazing and was able to work from my hastily drawn top.  It’s nice when I can draw something and say, “Like this, only symmetrical” and know it will happen.  We mocked the body up in cardboard first because I was nervous about size. I wanted it to be big, but I didn’t want the puppeteer to have to be working at full extension.

That photo, by the way, is actually of Jodi disassembling the bear for packing, but some of the assembly photos are locked on my camera which is refusing to let me download anything but the pictures on the card.

While she did made the bear’s frame, I had Rob Kimbro working on sanding and trimming pieces of Loki. Photos of Loki tomorrow.

And me? I was redesigning that head.  The problem with flat patterns of the puppets is that the paper looks like, well, paper, and is either in a stack somewhere or in the recycling.

The biggest challenge there was that I had to tape paper together to get something large enough.

I also worked on Thor’s control mechanism. I cut out the control on the bandsaw in bass wood. Bass wood is light, fairly strong, and easy to work with. The part about being light is very important with puppetry. You don’t want the puppeteer to be spending unnecessary energy just supporting the puppet when they could be performing.  Comfortable controls are a part of that equation.

I then shaped it with a belt sander to receive a beefy compression spring that will support the weight of the bear’s head.  That inserts into a pvc pipe coupling and is held in place with a bolt.

(I’m not holding the control in operating position here.)

The other end of the control gets inserted into the bear’s head and is tacked into place with hotglue.  This is just  rehearsal head of paper. Once we are certain we like the size of the puppet I’ll make the final head in teak veneer, reinforced with paper mache.

You can see that even cut down by three inches all the way around, Thor is quite large. He has a PVC spine that runs through his body.  It splits in the middle for packing otherwise they’d never get him on a plane.

The joint in the middle doubles as the hand grip.  It’s two couplings with a mahogany dowel in the middle.  Comfy, sturdy, and practical. It’s all the rage in Asgard.

And here is Thor, draped. For the finished puppet, I’ll use a mix of fabrics to create the look of a hand-felted pelt.  His head will be teak instead of the world’s-crappiest-paper-which-tore-everytime-I-pulled tape-off-and-I-hate-so-much which I used for the mockup.

I didn’t give the puppets legs to allow them to play more freely with the space. Once you have legs, they have to move right and that would take more puppeteers. For the story, these are best played with solo puppeteers.We can rely on the audience to create the rest of the creatures.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about Loki.

Sorry for the terrible photo. The pencil lines were too light to pick up and I was too lazy to go back and redraw it so you can see it. BUT this is the full scale side view of Odin as an eagle.  You can see that I use two different colors of pencil. The blue is what things look like in the standard operating position.

The orange is what I call “flight mode.”

Odin is attached to the end of a staff which can act as a perch or be hoisted into the air to get greater height.  When it’s in the air, the puppet will be unattended, so I needed ways to make sure that it stayed in a clean line but still had free movement when it was at standard operating height.

Interestingly enough, I wound up having to deviate from the plan a little once I got the puppet assembled. I couldn’t find some of the materials I’d planned on using so had to go with Plan B.

I had already worked out the pattern for the puppet’s head, so I lay it on a sheet of birch veneer. See the nice big open section of the grain at the top? I positioned the pattern on that so it was on the crown of Odin’s head and the pointing part was on his beak.

One of the things that is fun about veneer is playing with the natural textures of the wood.

For reference, here are the veneers of all the God’s.  I originally wanted to use birdseye maple for Odin but when I looked at the veneers the texture was not pronounced enough to be interesting.

Thor will be teak.

Loki will be paduak.

I’ve worked with something called “PaperWood.”  It’s a microthin veneer backed by paper and behaves pretty much just like paper.  Actual veneer is much harder to work with.  I cut it using scissors.

Normally when I score paper, I use a bone folder. This has zero useful effect on the veneer.  So I scored it very, very gently with a razor blade.

I then had to soak the veneer in water to make it pliable enough for some of the bends.  Alas, this meant that my tape and glue no longer worked.  I used binder clips to hold the pieces roughly in place while it dried. Once it was dry enough to take tape, then glued it together as usual.

Here is the finished head.

I had to make the beak a separate piece from the rest of the head in order to get the bend I wanted where the head and beak meet.

I designed this without a lower jaw, but suspect that I will go back and add one later.

Overall, this is a pain in the hiney to do but, I think, worth it.

Here is the assembled puppet. This is not finished, just assembled.

Rob Kimbro, the director of Odd and the Frost Giants, and Jodi Bobrovsky, the props master, are coming out this evening to pick up rehearsal puppets. In order to get Odin on the plane, we’ll have to partially disassemble the puppet.

I’m also experimenting with veneer wings. They are backed with paper, but my instinct says that they will crack and break off from use and just being hit against things.

I’m taking photos with my phone, so you’ll have to trust me that the woodgrain is there and pretty.  The original plan was to use cloth, the way I’m using cloth on the other puppets, but I so liked the look of the veneer that I thought it was worth giving it a try in rehearsal. Swapping out to other wings is easy enough.

Here’s the rough design concept for the Odin puppet for the Stages Repertory Theater production of Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants.

Odin was surprisingly difficult to design in this aesthetic and have him not look either cute or like Sam the Eagle. Really, I was annoyed by how hard this was.  You can see one of my failures in the upper part of the page.

What I finally came up with is a very stripped down bird.  Among other decisions, I’ve decided to simplify the body. I basically gutted the body so that Odin is a head, wings with only a reference to a tail.

Where the wings meet gives the impression of body, but there’s not actually anything there.

I also stuck him on a stick, which I think will work nicely.

The concept is that he’ll be on top of a staff which the puppeteer can treat as though Odin has alighted on a tree.  Odin’s neutral position will be in flight mode, so perpendicular to the staff.

When the puppeteer is performing him, he’ll use a rod on the back of Odin’s head to hold the puppet in an upright position and look around.  When Odin flies, the puppeteer will let go of the head rod and use the length of the staff to get the entire figure way up in the air.

Here’s my trial of the head in paper. I’m still not totally happy with this but it’s good enough to put something together for a rehearsal puppet while I continue to tweak the design.

I have one thing on here that I doubt I can do with the wood veneer.  That hard crease at the beak? Yeah… It’s likely that it will crack when I try to do the fold. But it has such nice depth from the front that I’m going to give it a try anyway. I’ll probably have to build that as two separate pieces.

There’s a saying in theater that if you can’t fix it, feature it. So I’ll probably feature this by using a different color of veneer for the beak.

And this is the blind side of Odin.  Incidentally, I was going to give a soft impression of eyes, instead of a strong focus.  Odin’s missing eye is the the reason that all the puppets will have eyes. You can’t show that an eye is missing on one character if no one has them.

Next up: Full scale drawings.

I wrote this up for Rob Kimbro, the director of Odd and the Frost Giants. He is auditioning actors and needs a rehearsal puppet.

Loki is a very simple rod puppet. He has a rod in the head, a flexible foam body, and a rod in the tail. The puppeteer stands in full view of the audience to manipulate the puppet.  Because the figure has no legs, it can play in the air without raising the question “What is it standing on?”  Or at least, this won’t be a problem if it is clearly established that the figure is “walking” by means of the movement choices.

To make a mock for the audition, use a piece of cardboard rolled into a cone for the head. Tape on simple triangular ears. Do not give the puppet eyes. The final puppet will have eyes.  For audition purposes you want the simplest possible focus on the  puppet so use the ears and nose for that. Glue a dowel into the base of the head. Tie and glue (or tape) a stout cord to the dowel where it meets the head. The body will ultimately be foam covered with cloth, but for the audition you can use foam, a household sponge, or twisted newspaper. (see sample below) The tail is a feather duster, wadded up newspaper on a stick, or anything similar. Tie and glue (or tape) a stout cord to the tail right at the base of the duster or newspaper. Glue or tape the cords to the body. Tug on it to make sure it doesn’t come apart instantly. Pack extra tape for the audition.

And this is my hasty mockup in newspaper. Foam will move better but newspaper will be just fine.

And as the final visual aid — sorry I can’t be there — here is me moving the mockup.  What I want you to look for in the auditioners is a sense of breath and that the puppet is looking at things.

Ideally, they’ll have an idea of how long the puppet’s “stride” is and maintain a consistent relationship with their imaginary ground.

In the video, I’m looking at the camera, because I thought the audio was working so I was telling you what to look for.  For actual performance, I would want the puppeteer’s focus to be on the puppet’s head or center back.  The puppeteer should strive to keep their own body as neutral as possible, particularly since there are moments, later, when we will need to distinguish between puppeteer and actor.

While I was in Utah, I had occasion to visit the home of the Tayler’s.  Knowing that they have four children, I brought along The Broken Bridge, my tiny little puppet show. Sandra has written a charming account of the afternoon spent playing with her children.  With pictures!

“Tra la la!” said Mary as she made the little shadow puppet move behind the back lit screen. In front of the screen my four kids sat spell bound, watching the surprisingly life-like motions of the little shadow man. A second player entered the stage and Mary gave this character a distinctly different voice. “Is this the road to London?”

Read the whole thing at One Cobble at a Time » Shadow Puppets with Mary Robinette Kowal.

Last summer, I went down to L.A. for an action-packed week for some pre-production work on Rose: the 3-D Puppet Zombie Musical. It’s an independent feature film. In 3-D! It’s written by John Skipp and has one of the weirdest and most compelling scripts I’ve run across in awhile. Allow me to just refer you again to the subtitle of the film: Puppet Zombie Musical. In 3-D!

My role in the production will, if all the pieces come together, to design the sets and puppets.  But… the independent part is where you come in. That’s right, it’s fund-raising time. If you can pitch in, that would be all kinds of awesome. You can do it for a number of different reasons such as:

1. It’s a cool project. (Seriously, I love the script)
2. Cool donor gifts. (Want a puppet? A zombie puppet?)
3. You will help make sure I get a paycheck. (What? Puppeteers gotta eat.)
4. Zombie. Puppet. Musical. In 3-d! (You need more of a reason?)

Check out the video that they’ve put together and then head over to Kickstarter if you can chip in.

This is a gag reel put together in 1990 by Disney to welcome the Muppets back.

While I can’t explain what pirates have to do with Christmas, the music video gives an idea of what life was like back stage at Lazytown. I’m under the scenes in a several of these shots.

I’ve been researching material options today as well as looking at Thor’s body. I spent a little while also trying a couple of patterns for Loki’s face, so allow me to show you my progress and thinking to date.

The idea with this one is to create a lightweight rib structure of polyethylene foam and drape it with muslin dyed to match the wood. Over the entire structure, I’d stitch strips of PaperWood, which is a thin veneer backed by paper. I love the way this would look, but suspect that it would be unconscionably loud. Pretty, but probably not actually viable. I’m going to look at cloth to see if there is anything with a wood grain look that might provide a similar look without the sound.

This concept is very similar except that we’re only playing with the body, and not the legs. I’m imaginine this made with very rough felt to look like traditional Norwegian handfelted garments. It is similar in concept to what I’ve got in mind for Loki. One reason to create a figure that doesn’t touch the ground is for the practical reason that Loki will be smaller and hence harder to see if he plays the floor.  Having no legs gives a lot more flexibility in what the audience will accept as “ground.”  Also, it means that the puppeteer won’t have to manage extra limbs.

Speaking of Loki. I’ve been playing with his face. The pictures of foxes that I’ve been looking at are all about the ears and the snout.  Then they have this fantastic ruff around their heads. It’s also interesting that Loki is not an arctic fox, but a red fox which isn’t native to Norway.  It’s more common now, but is crowding out the native.  That Loki… such a trouble-maker. You’ll notice that I’m adding eyes now to the concept drawings. When I get to Odin, he’s missing an eye, which means that everyone needs to have eyes to miss.  This does make folding the form a little harder, but it should be fun.

The first attempt snout was too short.  Kinda cute, but wrong. I’m also trying to make Loki’s face asymmetrical.  As a general rule, people perceive symmetrical faces as more beautiful and virtuous. Since Loki is a mischief maker, I’m twisting his face a little by giving him a broken nose. In truth, I usually make puppet faces asymmetrical because you can get the illusion of a change in facial expression as the light plays over them. But with characters like Loki, I go for really obvious asymmetries.

So I made a flat pattern from it and lengthened the snout. I evened up the back of the head and made some adjustments to the eyes but otherwise it was mostly about giving myself more space for the nose. (If you want to you can watch me make another figure all the way through.)

I feel better about this effort but am not totally sold on it. The forehead doesn’t sweep up the way I would like it to, but I don’t have enough paper in the eye region to do that the way the pattern is currently cut. There’s a chance that I might have to do this one out of two pieces of paper. The advantage there would be that I could use two colors of veneer and get the red and white in the face without paint.

For the next little while, I’ll be doing periodic posts about creating the puppets for a production of Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants at Stages Theatre in Houston Texas.  Most of these posts are actually going to be written for Rob Kimbro, the playwright and director of the show, as well as the rest of the design team but we thought that you might be interested in following along as well.

Because Odd is the son of a woodcarver and a pretty good hand at carving wood himself, my inclination is to use wood for the puppets.  At first glance, this didn’t seem feasible because wood is heavy and it is labor-intensive to create.  The weight is a serious issue.  While it is possible to paint something with very realistic woodgrain, that adds to the labor involved in creating the piece.  Because we will probably need multiple versions of some of the figures, I wanted to avoid a style that would be too expensive to make duplicates of.

The approach that I’m suggesting is to use Albrecht Roser’s paper folding technique with wood veneer. This should give us a beautiful woodgrain finish with very, very lightweight figures.  The style is also naturally stripped down and spare which I think lends itself to the Nordic landscape of the story.

As a trial, I’ve taken a stab at the bear’s head.

I was surprised when I started working on this to realize that Thor was a brown bear. Being in Norway, I was expecting a polar bear and I was so wrong. Norway has brown bears. One of the immediate problems are going to be those adorable ears. It will be difficult to avoid making them seem cute. Thor is not cute.

I first start by drawing an actual bear head and then clean up the lines to a point that I think I can recreate it in paper.  You can’t see it but there was a lot of erasing going on with the page. I’m trying to position the ears laid back against the head to make him a bit more formidable but am not happy with them.  I’ll probably wind up fiddling a lot when it’s in three dimensions.

Here’s a check to see if I can get the basic shape. This is only the top half of the bear’s head because I need a bigger sheet of paper. Still it’s enough for me to see that the form is possible with the paper-folding technique. From here I’m going to move on to concepts for the full figure of the puppet before going back to work on Loki and Odin.

I’m heading back down to Portland to perform in a Puppet Slam with Jodi Eichelberger. This is the first chance to see Jodi and me perform together in Portland in almost a decade.  He and I have been trying to sort out when our last show was here and aren’t entirely sure.

For those of you who mostly know me as a writer, Jodi is my creative partner with Other Hand Productions. Since he moved to NYC to be in Avenue Q and then to Iceland for Lazytown, we don’t get to perform together very often.  This should be fun.

We’ll be performing “Dinner Conversations” which is a very short piece as part of the Puppet Slam at the Someday Lounge, 125 NW 5th Avenue. ($8 at the door).