Well, isn't it always the way...just as I was planning to get things back on track with Bear Town life got in the way I got sidetracked by something else. Only this time it was something very, very cool - I started working with a bunch of other puppeteers and puppet builders in Toronto and I've done more puppetry work in the past nine months than I had in previous two and a half years. The video above is of our first public performance back in February.
We've been focused on doing bunraku-style puppetry work which has got me thinking about a totally different approach to the puppetry in Bear Town. I'm not really sure when I'll be back at Bear Town full-tilt, but the gears in my head are turning.
Wok With Marshall was the first episode of The Marshall and Buck Show, which was - to my knowledge anyway - the internet's first puppet web series. The series was built around two characters I originally created for my Bear Town project, Marshall and Buck. Each episode featured Marshall and Buck engaging in some kind of activity like cooking, acting, or putting on a magic show that would go horribly awry. Four episodes of the show were sporadically produced between 1997 and 2000, starting with Wok With Marshall which was shot in 1997, but didn't premiere online until March 10, 2000.
Unfortunately, because I don't own any of the master tapes from the series it hasn't been available online for a long time, but I did recently find a high quality dub of Wok With Marshall so I thought I would share it here. It's a little rough, but keep in mind that we did make it over ten years ago.
The puppeteers in the video are the brilliant Shawn Hazelton (Marshall), myself (Buck) and Kim Mahony and Pauline Antonopoulos, who performed the Happy Meal puppets and Betsy, Marshall and Buck's cow. The video was directed by Brenda Tan, who's also credited as the writer although I seem to remember that half of this was ad-libbed on set.
I'm embarrassed to admit this, but it was only this past week that I finally saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time. This is one of the funniest (and most famous) scenes in the movie; Indy has survived a mad chase/fight through the casbah only to be confronted by a big guy with an even bigger sword and some flashy skills. Exhausted and in no mood to fight, Indy pulls out his gun and shoots the sword-wielding bad guy dead.
Legend has it that this famous scene came about because Harrison Ford had a developed a terrible case of dysentery filming the movie in Tunisia. As scripted, the fight scene between Indy and the swordsman would have required three days to shoot, so Ford - presumably motivated by a desire to spend less time suffering in the heat and more time on the toilet - suggested "why don't I just shoot the guy?".
As the cliche says, necessity is the mother of invention.
This simple gag probably plays much better than whatever fight scene had been originally scripted and is a good example how simpler is almost always better. I was reminded of the "K.I.S.S." principle today while working on the Bear Town script on the way home from my office. The script was originally written as an independent feature and I have been carving it up in to small chunks that will work as 3-5 minute webisodes.
There are sections of the script I really don't like; the dialogue is clunky and the story doesn't feel like it flows naturally. I was really struggling to figure out how to make a couple scenes work tonight when it suddenly occurred to me that I could just cut them. That in turn inspired me to reorder a couple other scenes and eliminate a few more. In a span of fifteen minutes on the bus I probably cut thirty pages of script down to ten. Everything is much shorter, simpler and (most importantly) funnier.
There was quite a buzz in the puppet blogosphere recently about Figurenschneider, a German puppet company run by Norman Schneider. I'm not sure who was the first to spot the site, but I saw mentions of it on the dotBoom Blog and Thistledown Puppets among others. Norman's puppets have a unique, hand crafted and time-worn quality to them that you see in a lot of European puppets (especially German ones) for some reason. They look a little different and I think we need more of that in puppetry, especially here in North America.
What I thought was most refreshing about them was that they don't look like they were made with Antron Fleece.
Antron Fleece, if you don't already know, is the material most commonly used to make Muppet-style television puppets, so much so that it's often referred to as "Muppet Fleece". It has a heavy pile (meaning it's fuzzy) that disguises seams and it can be dyed to any colour. The only problem is that you can't buy it at your local fabric store and for along time the information about how to order it was a jealously guarded secret in the television industry. That all changed about eight or nine years ago when thanks to the internet. Once "the secret" was out lots of puppet builders started working with Antron fleece. As more and more people started using Antron fleece I started noticing that more and more the puppets I saw on the internet had the same sort of "Antron look" to them.
I designed many of Bear Town's characters when I was a teenager in high school. Although back then I didn't work with Antron fleece, I was - and in many ways still am - heavily influenced by The Muppets. As I start rebuilding the Bear Town puppets I've come to realize that unless I want to redesign all of them I'm stuck working with a style of puppet that could end up looking very Muppety or derivative if I'm not careful. So the challenge then is how to do I make Bear Town's puppets more visually interesting and original?
I don't have all the answers yet, but I think one of the best ways start is try working with materials other than Antron Fleece and experiment with using different materials and different textures. Whatever I do, I want Bear Town's puppets looking less like this:
Starting work on Bear Town again, it makes sense to start at the beginning. I have always been a fan of really creative opening sequences, especially the work of Kyle Cooper and his company Prologue Films. I've always had a bit of a block about what Bear Town's opening sequence should be like and so recently I have been looking for inspiration.
I went to see Juno last weekend and really loved its hand-drawn animated opening credits by Shadowplay Studio, which have been creating a lot of buzz on the internet lately (you can watch them above via YouTube, but a higher quality version can be found here).
Shadowplay also did the opening credits for Thank You For Smoking, which like Juno was also directed by Jason Reitman (for a higher quality version click here).
On the puppet podcasting front, I really like the titles/credits that Brian Hogg creates for his various podcasts. The dotBoom opening (above) is one of my favourites and the opening to his Inside Hoggworks video blog features some great use of typography.
I'm still not sure what I am going to do, but I have been playing with the idea of incorporating shadow puppets or at least a shadow puppet aesthetic. A few years ago I was involved with the development of a 2D digital puppetry system called Flash Puppet that allowed puppeteers to create Flash animation using puppetry for a proposed cable show called Suzie Shadow. The project never got green lighted, but it would be fun to play with the technology again.
I will have to think about this a little more. Until then, if like me you're interested in film titles and motion graphics, a great web site to visit is Forget The Film, Watch The Titles.
Here's some more blast-from-the past video...The World's Angriest Puppets (TWAP!) began as an attempt to film a Bear Town TV pilot as a special year-end project when I was studying Radio/Television broadcasting in college. As I think I've explained here before, myself and the classmates who worked on this grossly underestimated the amount of time and resources that were required to pull off such an ambitious project. When we realized that we weren't going to finish the video in time to get a grade and pass the course I panicked and decided to take most of the footage we had shot along with shots from other puppet videos I had been working on and randomly splice it all together to make an "experimental film".
I completely cop to the fact I was just desperate to pass my course with this, but I do remember being heavily influenced by Jim Henson's Timepiece at the time and I tried to give the video a similar sort of stream-of-consciousness feel. The name "The World's Angriest Puppets" was a random one that I think just adds to the (somewhat intentional) unevenness of "TWAP". I look back at this video now as kind of failed experiment. It may not make a lot sense when you see it here, but it was the beginnings of Bear Town.
One problem with this video is that it has some uncleared music in it. I've always wanted to include this as an extra on a Bear Town DVD eventually, but that would require going back and editing out the uncleared material. There's also a couple sections in this that drag a bit so I think it might be fun to pull a George Lucas and go back and make a few changes. Nothing major, just tighten up some of the editing, redo the titles and reframe a couple shots where the puppeteers' heads show.
Until then, enjoy The World's Angriest Puppets original and uncut.
I was going through an old hard drive I store a lot of Bear Town-related material on and came across these outtakes from the first two episodes of the 2004 web series. Most of the funny in this is courtesy of Hank, performed by the very talented (and funny!) Chris Grom.
