Comments on: Hansjürgen Fettig interview

By: Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:12:57 +0000

I wish we lived in the same city for all sorts of reasons.

Also, I just got extremely lucky because a friend has sent me a transcription!

By: Delia

Delia — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:09:45 +0000

I see what you mean. Still, his actions are, on the whole, a lot more eloquent than his language. He’s speaking a very basic French, with lots of, “you put the thingy in there, like that, see?” and “you can move him this way and that way, and make him walk and lift his arm with a stick.” The cool take-away I got from the video is that he never makes eyes with glass and pupils and all that stuff (I’m translating loosely) because they’re fixed and artificial. Creating clever shadows gives the illusion of real eyes. He also sprays the skins of the puppets with fine sand before he paints them, “to make the camera happy.” There’s a lot of “This is half an egg and this is part of a sphere and this is a cone”–all of cardboard, I gathered after a while.

OK, now I really wish we lived in the same city. I could sit and translate and you could tell me what it all means.

By: Kelvin Kao

Kelvin Kao — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:15:14 +0000

I’ve seen this video before. Didn’t understand the words then, didn’t understand it now. The mechanisms still looked cool anyhow.

By: Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:17:59 +0000

For a puppeteer, this is the equivalent of saying, “Jules Verne is just describing what he’s doing.”

“First I take out a fresh sheet of paper…” Doesn’t matter. He’s freaking Jules Verne.

By: Rose Fox

Rose Fox — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:28:40 +0000

He’s just describing what he’s doing. “You can lift one of the legs… and the other. You can make it bend forwards and backwards. You can make it walk, like so… For television, the white color will work but the yellow will not… An optician friend of mine got me these glasses.” Nothing earthshaking.