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

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.

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.

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.

So, I will now tell you the story of the Worst Show I Ever Did.

Jodi is my creative partner in Other Hand Productions. He and I had been invited to take our production of Snow Queen to the Northwest Regional Puppetry Festival. This is a show that I am extremely proud of and really enjoy performing.

This is part of what makes this performance so bad. There are other productions that I’ve been in that were poorly conceived or plagued by other problems from the outset, but this show was one I went into actively liking.

But…  for a variety of reasons it had been in the box for about a year. Sure, Jodi and I had pulled it out six months earlier to do a single show and it had been like getting on a bike. We had rehearsed once and remembered the show like we’d never left it.

For this festival, Jodi was in another show which was debuting. We wanted to run through Snow Queen, but the other show took all his free time. I was also the workshop coordinator for the festival.

Mistake Number 1: We didn’t run through the show.

To accommodate my schedule, they put our performance on the last day when most of my duties would be finished.

Mistake Number 2: Both of us were exhausted and sleep-deprived.

Add to this series of judgment errors, a theft. Our sound system had been stolen the month before the show. Tears of Joy Theater used the same sound system we did and kindly loaned us theirs.

Mistake Number 3: We didn’t fully test the equipment.

And now… the results of those three mistakes.

The day of the show arrived. Rob and I had been dating for about four months at this point and I really wanted him to see this show. So, this means that for the performance we faced an audience of professional puppeteers and my audio engineer boyfriend.

We walked onto stage to the largest squeal of feedback I’ve yet experienced. All I could think of was that I was dating an audio engineer. I tried to shake that off and keep going.

The first sound cue came up and I stepped on the foot switch to turn it on. No sound emerged. I stepped on it again. Still nothing. A third time produced sound.  Odd.

There’s this thing that happens when performing in a show like this. One part of your brain is engaged with acting while another part is engaged in the technical aspects. It feels like having two selves in some ways because I continue performing while internally going WTF?

I decided that what was probably happening was that the TOJ footswitch was a double-click pedal. Back when I toured for them, we’d had some of those and they were a pain. Basically, you had to click twice to turn on the machine.

So the next cue came up and I clicked twice. Nothing. Again with the clicking. Eventually the sound played but on stage there was this awkward pause in which we were trying to act fill the unexpected silence and diagnose the problem at the same time.

So we were continuing along, with all of our sound cues bizarrely late, and I saw Jodi start to bring the Goblin onstage. I thought that he’d been badly thrown by the sound cues because it wasn’t time for the Goblin’s scene. So I waved him off.

He put the puppet away and brought out Kai and we proceeded with the scene. As we were going along, the next thing that was supposed to happen was that Kai and Gerta were supposed to dance, and while dancing Kai would get a piece of glass from the Goblin’s broken mirror in his eye.

The problem was… the mirror hadn’t broken yet. I had been wrong when I waved Jodi and the Goblin off. Wrong, wrong, wrong. In fact, if we hit the footswitch for the characters to dance, the cue that would play — if it ever played — would be the sound of the mirror breaking.

Of course, we’re miked so we can’t talk to each other and we’re wearing hoods so we can’t make meaningful eye contact. So I ad libbed, to try to get us out of this scene and back on track. The scene went something like this.

Kai: You wouldn’t be so cold if you were moving around. Why don’t you try dancing.

Gerta: No… I think I’d like to go inside now.

Kai: Oh come on! You love dancing.

Gerta: Yes, I know. But I really would like to go inside. Now.

Kai: (thinking I’ve forgotten, Jodi kindly feeds me Gerta’s line) But you’ve always said dancing makes you feel light as a feather!

Gerta: Yes. That’s true. But I would like to go inside. Now. With you.

Kai: (reaching for the foot pedal) But I know you’ll be warmer once you dance.

Gerta: I’m going to get some hot chocolate. (exits)

Jodi later reported thinking, “Boy, her leg must have broken or something. I’ll stall here to give her time.”

So I stood there, waiting for him to come off stage while he did an admirable job playing in the snow and trying to be entertaining after one of the most senseless scenes ever.

I finally turned off my mic and crossed behind Jodi. Leaning forward I whispered, “I was wrong.”

This is what the audience saw.

Kai: (playing in the snow) Whee! I love the snow. That Gerta is so sil– … … Hot chocolate does sound good. (exits)

We continued on, did the goblin scene, then Gerta and Kai came out and danced with numblingly late sound cues. Eventually we learned what was happening but by this time the show was staggering as if it had run into a wall and become badly dazed.

Basically, our minidisk player had to be stopped at the end of each cue. Because of that we had three seconds of silence at the end of each cue. The TOJ minidisk player automatically stopped itself at the end of each cue. So what we were doing was turning the sound off during the three seconds of silence after a cue, as usual. Then, when we started it again, it would roll to the end of the three seconds of silence and turn itself off. So we’d double-click, which would turn it off and then on again.

There were also issues with scenery getting stuck. I remember having to actually break a set piece to get it off stage because it got stuck so badly

This was the only time in my life where I didn’t want to take a curtain call.  The audience was polite but I was mortified. Afterwards, a puppeteer who I really respect tried to find words in which to acknowledge that they’d seen the show without having to admit that they hadn’t like it.

We use phrases like, “I’m so glad I got to see you work,” or “I would never have thought to do it that way,” or “What an interesting show.”

I stopped her in the middle and said “That was a terrible show. It’s fine.”

All the tension went out of her and she said, “What happened? I didn’t think it could possibly be like that.”

Now, I’ve had set pieces fall down on stage and the audience thought it was part of the show but this… this show was just broken all the way through.

To this day, when I screw something up I compare it to that show and usually think, “At least no one had to go get hot chocolate.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

So hard to look away…

These are not the horse puppets you are looking for…

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 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?

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!

They had Topthorn here, the black horse. He is a gorgeous, gorgeous puppet that just wants to do the work if you don’t fight him.  We spent most of the time just trying to walk.  Walking is a four-beat gait so very hard. They divide the role into Head, Heart and Hind.  The heart is the one in the center and controls the front legs. Walking went right front (1), left rear (2), left front (3), right rear (4). The Heart puppeteers legs moved in time with the puppets legs, so both right legs went at the same time. (I never got to try the Heart position, though they let me play with the controls after.)

The Hind puppeteer’s legs move counter to the horse’s legs. It got confusing. Also, the legs are behind the puppeteer so you have to rely on feel to know what was happening.  It was… challenging.

Basically they just rotated us through trying folks in different positions. I worked the Head once and the Hind twice. It was loads of fun and MY GOD the puppet is beautiful. It just wants to work and all the puppeteer has to do is not get in the way of it being a horse. Clearly, we’re supplying the physical means for that but horses are very much about stillness and it’s hard to not want to Move The Puppet at times when it should wait.

The other challenging thing is that you can see squat, so it really is all about feeling and breathing and trying to think together. One of the reasons that I love multiple person puppets is that there comes a moment when you stop being three people strapped to a thing and all have the same thought. It’s the closest to telepathy that I’ve experienced.

One of my favorite touring memories comes from a Tales of Japan show.  I was on the feet of this character called Myoga. He had to climb a mountain, which would later collapse. Something went wrong and the mountain collapsed early so the poor guy was looking at a sheer rock face but we STILL had to get to the other side. My partner and I stopped being two people and just went into this full on rock-climbing routine. I love that sense of sharing the same mind. Ballroom dance, with a good partner, is similar.

Since none of what we were doing in rehearsal was choreographed, it was all improvised. That’s tricky under normal circumstances but more so with folks that you’ve never worked with before since you won’t necessarily have the same vocabulary of movement. But it can work if you can get into that fusion of minds. I felt like that happened toward the end a little. It wasn’t a perfect blend but it made me sense all the possibilities.

Lord knows what will happen because there were no clues in the workshop, but it was worth coming out just to play and spend an afternoon being a horse.

Then I went up to have lunch with my editor, the Hugo-nominated Liz Gorinsky (have you voted yet?) and my publicist Cassandra Ammerman.  That was fun and was split between talking about business and just shooting the breeze.

Cassie and I took some time to talk about the upcoming publicity for Shades of Milk and Honey. She also read a review that’s coming out in August that made me faint with delight and relief. Sorry, you’ll have to wait a bit on that one.

From there I headed over to visit some friends and then immediately ran into Rose Fox and Josh Jasper with a group of folks having lunch in the park. New York is such a small town.

KGB in the evening was delightful. Man, I have seriously missed the community here. Mind you, I love Portland and it was the right choice to move back but there are definitely things that I miss about NYC.

Today is all about audition prep. I slept unevenly and am sort of rattling around the apartment until it is time to go. My trainer, who is awesome, emailed me with reminders to stretch and do warmups before the audition. Also to drink plenty of water. It’s really nice to feel like people are looking out for me.

Jodi auditioned yesterday. He and I talked through his experience this morning so I have a few more ideas about what to expect when I go in this afternoon. Really though, none of this speculation matters. They’ll walk us through the puppets and talk about what they are looking for when I get there. It’s all a mental trick I’m performing to keep myself calm and focused on the work.

Because really, gnawing my arm off with nerves would not be useful for a puppetry audition. I’ll need that hand.

So what we have here is a troop of active soldiers who happen to train for warfare from horseback. This isn’t an amateur re-enactment group, these are actual soldiers.

This video is of their annual Musical Drive. Apparently, some of the formations they are doing have been in the drive since 1897.

There are loads more videos of them training and working. Very cool stuff.

This means I can make some guesses about the format, although they are just guesses at this point. I know that one of the horses will be there along with the puppetry coordinator. Since there are nine of us and the horse takes three puppeteers, my guess is that they will show us how to use the horse and then rotate us through different slots and combinations of puppeteers.

Since they are auditioning for four days with a morning and afternoon slot each day, my guess is that they’ll probably see about 70 puppeteers. The show requires 12 for the cast but some of those may be precast.

There’s really not much I can do with this information but knowing that the audition will be in workshop format makes me relax some because it means I’ll have three hours in which to watch and try to understand the puppet. The worst is when you come in and have five minutes.

They’ll pick a group from that to go onto call backs the following week, which I am trying my hardest not to think about. I may get in there and just be too small. 

Here’s another of the video diaries from the West End production. They go visit real horses of the King’s Troop. Around the 2:30 mark Toby Olié talks about being conscious of how he was sitting as a rider because of the time he’s spent as a horse. Fascinating stuff.

War Horse Video Diary: Episode 2 from Toby Olié on Vimeo.

This is an interesting experience for me. I’d already been talking to Rob about feeling like I wanted to go to the gym because I was uncomfortable in my body. This isn’t about size so much as fitness. See, for most of the past twenty years I’ve been supporting myself as a puppeteer.

A typical day when I was on tour involved carrying in the set, putting it up and then performing two shows, taking the set down and carrying it out.  Our speakers weighed 50 lbs each and I used to carry them in, one in each hand, without thinking about it.  In fact, I delighted being at schools where  gentlemen custodians of a certain age could not stand to see the young lady carrying things. They’d offer to take the speaker and, though I’d demur,  I’d eventually hand them one with a straight arm.

I giggled inside to watch them realize that it was heavy.

In the Sleeping Beauty story that I tell sometimes in bars, the thing I don’t mention is that the puppets weighed between 10 to 15 lbs and that I performed by leaning on a rail, with my arms held straight out in front of me.  For an hour. To give that a try, take a gallon of milk and hold it out in front of you. It weighs about 8 1/2 pounds.

Anyway, the point of that little digression is that since we moved to Portland, I’ve been mostly writing and doing some construction, but nothing that involves repeated heavy lifting. I don’t have any habits built around having a sedentary lifestyle.

It’s one of the reasons I bike everywhere.

It also leaves me in the position of suddenly needing to hit the gym in order to prepare for an audition.  The puppets weigh 66 pounds without a rider. I won’t be back to my speaker-carrying days, but I already feel better and am reassured that the weight of the horse is still well within my range. Even so, I’m likely continue when I return from NYC. Sedentary sounds good, but really isn’t any fun.

Now, while I’m off being tortured here is the first of 6 video diaries that Toby Olié shot for the National Theatre about War Horse.  He was one of Joey’s puppeteers in the initial run and is now on Topthorn. It’s a bit easier to see what the puppeteers are doing here because they are in street clothes.

War Horse Video Diary: Episode 1 from Toby Olié on Vimeo.

Granted, every person is different, but for the most part the mentality going into an audition is that it doesn’t matter. I mean, you want it. You want it badly sometimes, but there’s this mental adjustment you have to do in order to survive the audition process. You focus on it the way you focus on doing a show. So the goal is to give a really good audition, the same way you’d do a really good performance and then you walk away.

Because out of the hundreds of people they see for that part, the directors will cast only one person.

With writers, we do this whole rejectomancy thing, trying to read into the rejections to see how “close” we came to getting the part. Really, it doesn’t matter and in some ways it matters less than in theater.  How so? Let me explain and I’ll explain using a real world example.

Before I go any further let me explain the etiquette of discussing pending auditions.

I’m a normally rational person, around auditions I get very skittish and superstitious about jinxing things by talking about it.  As I said, my brain is not rational about this. There’s this whole variety of things that I have to do to convince myself that the results of the audition don’t matter when, of course, they do.

Please do not wish me luck. You can talk about how amazingly cool the show is, but not about me in relation to the show. If in doubt, just pretend the audition doesn’t exist.

Okay?

I mean it.

So, I’m going to be in NYC starting on June 15th to audition for Warhorse. This is exceptionally cool and the sort of audition that I would go to just for the chance of trying the puppets.

Here’s the trailer for the show, for those who haven’t seen it.

The show is one of the most beautiful uses of puppetry I’ve seen over a twenty-year career and I want this part very, very badly. But…

Realistically, my chances are slim because I’m at the bottom end of their height limit. With puppetry, there are solid mechanical reasons for casting someone based on size.   Even so, for the next two weeks, you’ll get to hear me talk about the things I’m doing to prep for the audition. This is why I want to hang out with horses for a bit. Youtube is only getting me so far and the clips are too short.

I’m doing all of this because I would dearly love to land this role but my focus isn’t on landing the part, it is on turning in a really good audition.

This is why for me, as a writer, rejections don’t really matter.  In theater, you go to auditions and sometimes, man, you want that part and you do a lot of intensive prep for the audition, then– maybe you don’t get past the first round, or you make it all the way to the end and get a cold, or you just aren’t right. Whatever it is, the rejection comes hard on the heels of the work and you only get one chance.

I’ve made the mistake of focusing on landing the part and hoping. I was one of the last three women called back for Avenue Q when it moved to Broadway. I worked so hard prepping that I lost my voice.

It was devastating, in part because I’d done it to myself. It is dangerous to want something too badly.

With writing, the rejection comes months after I did the work, after I’ve already moved onto another project that I’m excited about. I just pop the story in the mail and send it off to someone new. Eventually, it will sell if I’m patient enough.

There’s always another chance to sell a story. And I only have to do the work once.

This is why I say rejections don’t matter in fiction. Of course, I’d rather sell the story but the important thing, the thing I learned from theater is to put all my effort into performing the audition — which in writing is the story — and not worry about the results of the casting.  The performance of the audition is in my control. The casting isn’t.

The writing is in my control. The editor’s choice, isn’t.

You see why rejections for fiction make me laugh?

Just don’t wish me luck for an audition. It will make me think about landing the part. It will make me hope. I can’t afford that.

I don’t need to ride so much as watch.

If you do, would you contact me?

Edited to add: Thanks! I’ve got a couple of offers and am visiting with two different horse and riders this week.

You gotta wonder if Señor Wences saw this article when he came up with Johnny or if Otto Croy, the German artist credited with these figures saw Señor Wences. Or if these are just spontaneous independent developments.

Some of them go from odd into creepy.  Others are kinda cute.

We did this today.

There’s my beloved, manning the camera in his role as director. I limited my input to art direction and occasionally movement coach.

Interesting factoid… the table that the vase and flowers is sitting on is not a real table, although the vase and flowers are real.

It’s a music stand.

Well, a music stand with some strategically placed cut paper to change the silhouette into something more appropriate for the Regency.

What actually turned out to be a bonus was that we could change the height of the table depending on what we were filming at the time.  Also, I was able to raise the “feet” of the table above the bottom edge of the shadow screen so it was visible.

Because the light beam widens as it travels from the projector to the screen, even if you are only an inch away from the screen there’s a little well of shadow, that clips the bottom off of images. In this case it was pronounced because we also had a roll of paper on the ground as part of the screen.

Being able to tape the “feet” to the stand  gave me the ability to get over that dark area.

There’s still a load of work to do on the Shades of Milk and Honey trailer, but it’s all in Rob’s camp now. Me? I’m going to bed.

Once I survive that, I’ll show you how they are made. For now, though, I need to make sure that all the props are in the box and ready to go to the space tomorrow.

Whee!

The random spotting on her face, by the way, is the concrete wall. The actual screen will be a roll of white photographer’s paper.

We’re doing the entire trailer using various forms of shadows puppetry as a nod to the popularity of silhouettes during the Regency.  Interestingly, at this point in England silhouettes were called Shades.  So you could say that the trailer is shades of Shades of Milk and Honey.

There are four basic principles of puppetry and they all tie in fairly neatly to writing, or at least to how I approach writing.

• Focus
• Breath or rythym
• Muscle
• Meaningful Movement

One of the first things we talk about with puppetry is focus. Focus indicates thought. What the puppet is thinking about is what it is looking at. The same is true when you’re writing.  What you are having the character focus on tells the audience what the character is thinking about.

And it’s the same for what the character is looking at, or feeling or smelling for that matter.

In addition to what the character is looking at, the writer has control over what the reader is looking at.  Because as a writer, you can only show the audience one thing at a time. You have to rely on their imagination to build that picture based on that one thing at a time you can show them. So the order in which you show things also becomes important.

There’s this form of puppetry called overt puppetry which is where the puppeteer is in full view. Within about five minutes you stop noticing the puppeteer because they are using focus to direct your gaze. Humans are trained to look at what someone else is looking at. Like if I’m talking to you and I keep looking over your left shoulder, you are eventually going to turn around to see what the heck I’m looking at.

So as a puppeteer, what I’m looking at is what I want the audience to look at. I am controlling what I want them to look at by what I am focusing on. I am also, as the puppeteer, controlling what I am saying about what my character is thinking about by what my character is looking at.

As a writer, I can take that same principal and direct your attention by what I show you on the page and the order in which I show it to you.

Friday

Author Reading – 6pm

Three authors for the price of one! Cherie Priest, Mary Robinette Kowal, and The Ferrett

Saturday

Puppetry 101 – 10am

The history of puppetry, the different types, and the basic elements of manipulation

Aliens: Form and Function – 12pm

How do aliens in written and media SF influence the kinds of story that one tells about them? How do the demands of the story influence the aliens’ natures?

The Timeshredder, Mary Robinette Kowal, Michael Z. Williamson (m)

The Intersection of Puppetry and Science Fiction – 2pm

Much like science fiction and fantasy, puppetry is often seen as a childhood interest. Mary Robinette Kowal, professional puppeteer and Campbell award-winning author, talks about the what the speculative fiction community can learn from the world of puppetry.

Don’t Be Evil: The Google Books Settlement – 5pm

It’s well-known that Google’s slogan once was “Don’t be evil.” Did Google crossed the line with the Google Book Settlement? How does it impact authors and readers?

Jim C. Hines, Tobias S. Buckell (m), Steve Piziks, Mary Robinette Kowal

Mass Autograph session – 6pm

All our authors at the Con are pen-ready to sign your books!

Mary Turzillo, Cherie Priest, Karl Schroeder, Tobias S. Buckell, Doselle Young, Patrick Rothfuss, Michael Z. Williamson, Sarah Monette, Mary Robinette Kowal

Sunday

Adapting a Novel to a Podcast – 9am

With our constantly-on-the-go culture, why not make your work even more available (and safe!) for our commuter-based society! Two veterans of aural performance help you get started.

Mary Robinette Kowal, Daniel J. Hogan

Short Story Markets – 10am

Finding markets for your short stories in a rapidly-changing world.

Mary Robinette Kowal, Mary A. Turzillo, Michael Z. Williamson (m)

When Rob and I moved into the apartment, we had a lot of boxes. I kept wishing that there was something I could do with them and, at some point, stumbled across this cardboard DIY cat scratching pad. Unlike most of the ones you see out there, this actually looked pretty stylish plus it was a way to use cardboard.

So I cut boxes into 4″ strips and rolled them tightly, joining them with masking tape until I had I nice disc of cardboard. This took way more boxes than I expected and the disc is still a little small for Marlowe to nap on.

Then I ignored it for six months even though the masking tape was hideous.

After six months, I had some procrastination I needed to do, so I cut some Japanese rice paper into the same 4″ strips and used double-sided sticky tape to attach it to the disc.

Now we have the most beautiful cat scratching pad in the world.

Harriet gives it her stamp of approval.

It was the perfect thing for going to the beach, except I never took it there.  In fact, I think it’s been out of its bag twice.  It’s comfy but I just don’t ever have a need for it.

Why am I mentioning this? Because we’re selling the Elmo chair on eBay.

Go on, you know you want it.

I’d gone into the studio to have pictures of the puppet made and the photographer offered to take one of me, too. I think this is what I looked like most days.

That puppet was actually kinda cool. It was a commission from this woman who wanted a puppet to tell her grandchildren stories with. One of the design parameters was that she wanted the kids to be able to sleep with it like a stuffed animal, so the body had to be pretty sturdy. I used the tail and the shirt to mask the entry point and built the body out of two inch foam so it had some oomph. The rod was a paintbrush, because the grandmother was an artist, which could slip out of the hand for bed time.

I got incredibly lucky with the hat and the tiny blue Hawaiian shirt. I actually still quite like this puppet although other puppets that I built during college are in the puppeteers equivalent of the writer’s trunk.

Those photos will go back into the storage locker and only come out when I’m trying to encourage young puppeteers by showing them the crap I made early one.

What amazes me is that I got jobs with them in my old portfolio. Someday, someday I might show them to you, but not today.

To begin, I found an existing gnome in a position that would work for my needs. This one is called “The conductor.”  I really wanted one playing a guitar but the only one in that pose was also plaster, which wouldn’t work. I needed a resin gnome.

Gnome acquired, I first cut off his beard using a dremel tool with a rotary blade around his arm and belly and finishing with a hacksaw through the mouth.

This left a giant gaping hole in his body. While you do occasionally run across solid resin gnomes, I was not so lucky here. After the beard removal, I smoothed off the worst of the mustache using a grinder.

Using rough paper-mache, I bridged the gap in his stomach with three layers composed of long strips of rejection letters, critiques, and wheat-based wall-paper paste. This created a base to build on.

Next I began to reconstruct his face using loosely wadded pieces of paper-mache. Note that I’ve created the general area where the mouth should be but am not attempting to actually make any features.

I then smoothed the wads out by using strips of paper-mache and stuck the entire thing into a heat box to dry. A heat box is essentially an inverted bin with a hair dryer stuck into it. I use it on a concrete floor and check it periodically to make sure nothing has caught on fire.

Using two-part plumber’s epoxy, I rebuilt the face and put a layer across the paper-mache stomach. This is very sturdy and fast-curing material. The fact that it cures so quickly means that I only worked with very small pieces at a time. With a larger project, or one that I needed to make multiples of, I wouldn’t use this material but it was perfect for a quick one-of-a-kind item.

Here’s the finished sculpture, before paint.

Here’s the first layer of paint. Normally, I would put a layer of gesso down first, but had run out so I used two coats of acrylic paint to get the coverage I was looking for. Even though the hands were original, I still painted them so that they would match the face.

And here’s the finished gnome.

I’ve been keeping it off the internet, since it was a surprise, and referring to a “troll” I was building. My brother’s girlfriend called after receiving it today and thanked me in the spirit with which it had been given.

So, I thought I’d share my portfolio with you.

On the floor, you’ll see tape lines. the blue ones represent the original angle of the walls. The tan ones are the adjusted walls. Normally, I would do the measurements and then come home and work on paper, but because the man who is building the set was coming by, I needed to be able to have a clearer conversation with him about sizes than I was going to be able to given the my sketches. Which is why I laid things out in real space.

So this stuff that looks like a bizarre basketball court? That’s me designing with tape.

It also gave John Skipp, writer/director the opportunity to walk through the space with our lead, Chase McKenna, and begin thinking through action in the space. We discovered a couple of things in the process which should save us a load of trouble later on.

Back at the ranch, we had a production meeting to work out some more details, then I sat down to do actual drawings of the part of the set we need for promo shots.  Sunday, I’ll be painting it.

Anyway, I’m in L.A. through the morning of the 30th for a weekend of pre-production meetings on a 3-D film called “Rose” which is going to be a load of fun. This is the secret project I referred to landing a while back and I’ve been given the go ahead to do some posts about it.

Which I will totally do. But now I am going to bed.

I love Beaker… Poor guy.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Transcription/Translation of Hansjürgen Fettig Video

Puppet #1 (standing man):

Well, it’s a marionette with a long rod, and he can move for example like this, he can turn his head, and when he moves his head also the body moves itself, like that, and walking works like this, it’s a [room of air?] and I can hold it here from the bottom, and even, I can make it lean. On this side, I can make it lean. I put it back, here, and he walks with [elegant steps?], he turns his head like that. One can take the arm, with a **pige/tige,

[back view of puppet rod] Here you can turn it, but you can make it better, to make it easier, to move. The legs, they [come off] like that, with a snap, and then you put it back, like that. Right now, you can lean it, you can put your hand underneath, op op op op op, and then you put it back, and you can raise one leg, here, or the other. But it’s a question of exercise [practice]. That [the fabric under the feet], it’s not expensive, you can find it easily. But we’ll take another thing… [music]

Puppet #2 (man’s head):

Here we see the color, how to color, and this here is the side where you start. These are balls of cardboard; here it’s hidden with some paper with wall glue for wallpaper, and here I’ve stuck on using white glue, some sand for birds, very fine, it gives a surface that is good for the camera, or the [veri?], of course, because here you see the mark that it takes on with the camera, for television, that doesn’t work. [turns to the back] And that also no. But if you put that over the top, it gives a surface that is good. And the movements, they are like this. He can lean, you can hold it here and he can turn his head, he makes movements that are sufficient.

Drawing #1:

You have different possibilities for sticking them together.

Puppet #3 (female head):

I’ve taken normal glasses. I have a friend who’s an optician. He gives me the old models that he cant’ sell; it costs me nothing. And this is a head for putting into the figure, and moving. You can do something, what you want. And these are pipes that are cut in half, and I’ve glued it back with cardboard on top, to have a base. And if you look underneath, you can see that these are still geometric things. Also that is geometric [pointing to back of head], it’s part of a half egg. And the other thing [other side] is the other part of this egg, and you can stick hair on top of it. And the pipes make the eyes. With me, you never see eyes. Because eyes that are fixed, with the pupil and all that, they rest in their position. Here you have shadows that work toward the fantasy already. It’s a trick that I –

Puppet #4 (hooded head)

And if you take this one, it’s also very simple. I’ve taken here an egg, I’ve divided it in half, afterward I’ve stuck on top of it a piece of cardboard, and I’ve stuck it back together a little, a little divided, in this direction, it’s not exact. And here you get a line, and if you turn it like that, you get another figure/shape. More or less that. And from the side it’s more or less [friendly?], and from the front like that. The eyes are shadows. I do nothing else.

Drawing #2:

And it’s that, a cut piece, like that, a pipe that passes over, and you see here inside, what it’s like on the inside.

Back to Puppet #4: [showing the back] It’s a little **contreblaque? for the part, and the rest, I can take for the second, for the next figure that I’m going to make. And it’s still geometric shapes. With a large in place. There’s a large, a smaller. The smaller, it’s flat, and rounded. One more time rounded, but larger. Which is to say that you always have to change roundness, size, to have difference.

Puppet #5 (old woman’s head):

And here I’ve made the base (a little) in white. And this gives me just a sign where I can stick the hairdo. With some fabric or something that can pass …[unintelligible]… and here you absolutely have to keep the shape.

Drawing #3:

And if you look at the construction. You have a half-egg here, a half-egg over there, they’re placed on a total egg, directly on top. Here it’s a half-ball; this is an irregular half of an egg, and here I have a piece of tube. It’s a nose that I had around, I recovered it to make this… [music]

Puppet #6 (workings showing):

So these are plastic materials, they’re tubes of plastic, you can take it down, and this, this supports the shoulders. The shoulders are suspended also with thingies like this, inside. Now, to drive. You take that in your hand, you go like that. You turn, as you wish, it turns [the same?] if you like, and you take it like that, you lean it as you wish, and the shoulders move. The arms are suspended from here, and it’s simple to do. But me I prefer the other, it’s simpler.

[Other voice] How is it attached, here?

Here? [he shows it close up] In fact it’s easy to show, this is just for the shoulders, and the head is held up by this. I try to – there you go. You pull it out, you pull the manipulation, it’s a little tight, and there you go. Here you have the system, it’s for hanging curtains, in a van for example, it’s a spiral of metal [asi?], a wire [asi?], and it’s for stabilizing things that move. This part [drawing] is held up, here in the middle, and there, you have a prefabricated **caraban, it moves like this.

[showing puppet] If I hold it here, it makes movements like that. And the whole thing turns inside the figure.

Puppet #7 (headless workings):

I wanted to find the means to move the entire body. It works like that. And from the front, it’s like this. If I turn it over there, and here like that, I can turn just here the shoulders, and I can make contramovement, and it’s all snapped. Snapped here, snapped there, buttoned here, and in the middle I’ve got another thing that keeps the position. But the length, you have to try. That, you can’t know in advance. Each figure, it’s a different thing, for the distances. But this is old, the legs aren’t the best, they’re a little primitive. Anyway, I make them better, but it shows the system very very well.

End.

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.

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.

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?

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.

via Props

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

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.

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.

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.