Sometimes, a girl needs a break from things she has to do and takes it by doing something she wants to do, which uses exactly the same skill sets as the things she’s taking a break from. For instance, I’ve been doing a lot of book binding and work with marbled papers for the show Prisoner of the Crown.

As noted elsewhere, I have a weakness for paper and it wasn’t really possible for me to handle all of these papers without coveting. Especially since I had them scanned and was printing them onto giant sticker sheets for work anyway.

Giant sticker sheets… hm. And I’ve just gotten this new $10 folding keyboard.

Thursday, Jodi and I shot a pilot episode. We were the only two puppeteers on the shoot, and as often happens, the only people in the room with prior puppetry experience. The puppets were charming but, to my eye, built by a stage puppeteer rather than a film and television puppeteer. How could I tell? Small details, like visible specks of glue. Now, for stage, this doesn’t matter¹ but for film work you have to be prepared for extreme closeups.

These were rod puppets and the necks were extremely thin, long and sproingy. ² Our slightest tremor translated into a giant head wiggle. On top of that, the mouth trigger would actually pull the whole head down with it. None of this violated the forty feet and a galloping horse rule, but boy howdy did it look funny in a closeup. We weren’t doing lipsync so much as headsync.

AND one of the puppets broke moments after we got there. I had a total MacGyver moment and repaired the puppet with a paperclip, gaffers tape and superglue. ³

The guys we were working for were supernice and thankfully understood the challenges pretty darn quickly. On the whole, they seemed pleased. Hopefully I’ll be able to show you some of it down the line.

1. We have a saying, “forty feet on a galloping horse” which means that if you won’t notice it while galloping on horseback forty feet away you won’t notice it on the stage either [↩]
2. Yes, that’s a technical term. [↩]
3. No, I can’t describe the repair in more detail because to do so would require explaining what the characters were which would blow the secrecy around the pilot. [↩]

One of the joys, when I’m doing props, comes from creating paper goods. Letters, diaries and in this case, a 40-page poetry manuscript…. I took the text of the scene, fed it into the Bonsai Story Generator and got titles from the Book Title Generator. That gave me about ten pages, which I fed back into the story generator. The thing I love about it is that it makes things that flirt with sense without actually making sense.

Consider this gem.

Thoughts of a Sliver

The Vine Yearns for a tea table.
I take it.
Were done properly on a rule.
Oh.
What was your name when he was your letters from there?
Why him?
Forgotten Person, I said you ask
The last two there.
And that, yes.
My Pilot in the Light
Perhaps just a great deal.
The last two there.
You are a tea table.

Go on. Read it aloud in a “meaningful” voice and tell me that it wouldn’t fit in at a poetry slam.

For Steve and Idi I need a fake jelly donut.

This is a beautifully manipulated short with a paper puppet.

Now, I have to say that though I think this is really well done, it disappointed me. Let’s sum up. Puppet comes to life. Discovers world. Discovers that it is a puppet. Dies.

I was really excited when the video started, because it is beautifully shot and manipulated. I liked the way they let the light shine through the puppet and make no attempt to disguise that it’s a puppet made from brown paper. It is lovely. But then they had to go to the cliche ending. Granted, there are variations on this trope. Sometimes the ending is that the puppet kills the puppeteer.

This is not new material. I know, I know. There are no new ideas. I’ll grant that. But if you are going to recycle an old storyline, then you have to bring something new to it besides just making it pretty.

Bill Schafer, at Subterranean Press, realized that he wanted to send out one other Coraline thank you. We couldn’t do another doll, because we had said that there would only be three of them. So I suggested a Coraline mask.

Paper Forest, which is fast becoming one of my favorite blogs, linked to this series of photos of Moneygami. You remember doing this, right? Making a frog out of a dollar bill. There’s a whole new level of skill happening with these. In particular, check out the way the graphics on the money gets reinvented in the new creation.

Makes you want to go fold a dollar bill, huh?

Kako Ueda does startling works of cut paper. That’s right, the image below is not drawn; all the red stuff is cut out of a piece of paper. Astounding, eh, what a sharp knife can do.

Oh my heavens. Look at the beautiful paper work that Paper Forest found.

The whole collection is stunning and interesting, both as fashion (Rob loves it) and as cut paper art. In the photos of the catwalk, the last series shows the models tearing the dresses off. On the one hand, I wince, but on the other, it does celebrate the ephemeral aspect of paper.

Truly the whole site is worth exploring. Go! Off with you.

Well, my three lovely ladies are leaving home tomorrow. I’m shipping the Coraline puppets to Bill Shaffer at Subterranean Press. He in turn will send one to Neil Gaiman, one to Dave McKean and one to someone who pre-ordered the special edition of Coraline.

I wanted to make certain that I had good photos of the dolls, so I went over to Ellen Datlow’s this evening and let her do her camera magic. Behold.

With Halloween fast approaching, it seems like a good time to do a little project. Check out Skull-A-Day, which has a Papercraft Skull that you can make at home. The jaw moves via a tab that sticks out the back.

Via Puppetbuilding

Edited to add: Peterbilt spotted this “…amazing paper interpretation of Transformers’ Bumblebee, complete with Priceless translation from Chinese artist’s statement.” I gotta say, it is amazing, particularly the building shots. Each piece is made from a carton chosen for its color and then intricately folded.

I’ve got some video for you to show how quickly things can go.

The new They Might Be Giants Video uses paper robots in a really delightful animation that should feed your steampunk, robot, paper, animation loving impulses. It’s good. You’ll like it.

I particularly like the robot gladiators.

Spotted at the Paper Forest

When I was in high school on the debate team, and then again in college, my coaches emphasized the importance of finding primary sources. My debate partner and I had that particular lesson hammered home when we lost a round because we had relied on a secondary source, a newspaper article. It was reliable, the Wall Street Journal, but our opponents had gone back to the primary source — the study quoted in the article — and was able to produce two different quotes that showed ours was out of context and in fact represented the opposite of what we had presented it as. It was humiliating.

So, when I’m researching now for a show or a story, I’ll follow the bibliography trail back as far as I can trying to find my way back to the primary source. This has lead to everything from realizing that in fact we had picked the wrong sacred tree for a show set in India, to discovering that a historical character in a story had a death in the family during the period I was writing about them. That moment of discovery is wonderful and leads to richer stories.

Now, it’s not always possible to get primary sources, but a whole slew of reliable secondary sources will often do the trick.

But my favorite of all sources is called, “the expert witness.”

For instance: I’ve been trying to find out what fake cherries would have been made out of for millinary purposes. I have a scene in which Jane is trimming a bonnet. It’s a small detail, but I wanted to know. I checked online first, because it’s easy. Then I headed to the library. Loads of stuff on period hats and how they were trimmed, but nothing on what artificial cherries were made of. It was very frustrating.

This meant it was time to contact an expert witness since I had exhausted my other availble avenues. I wrote to Mr. Keith Dansey at Hat Works Museum and explained my question.

He just wrote back and has given me permission to excerpt his answer here.

We do have at least one hat in our display collection trimmed with imitation red currants, not precisely the same fruit, to be sure, and dated 1920 somewhat later than the period you have focused on. These are made of glass and possibly exemplify a millinery tradition encompassing the early 19th century.

Additionally, an 18th century German chemist by the name of J. Strasser developed a method if making imitation gems from ‘paste’ which is a lead glass compound. Possibly imitation fruits might be made from this. On the basis of this flimsy evidence, my money would be on some kind of glass. Other malleable materials, say, wax or plaster present with obvious problems.

His flimsy evidence beats anything else I’ve got. So now, not only do I have my answer for the scene I’m writing, I have a great detail for a later scene in which the hat reappears. It gets thrown to the ground on a marble floor. I’ve got glass cherries on it. Making a cherry crack on impact is the perfect accent to the emotion of the moment. I’m delighted on so many levels.

Expert witnesses are wonderful.