Puppeteer and Muppet veteran John Kennedy recently wrote a fantastic new puppet building book called Puppet Mania: The World's Most Incredible Puppet Making Book Ever that I think really lives up to it's name. The great thing about Puppet Mania is that it's simple enough for young people to follow, but John takes the reader way beyond the usual childish "craft" puppets and shows how to make some really great characters using common craft making materials. It's a must-have for anyone interested in building puppets.

In unrelated news, last weekend I began rendering the first CG sequences for Bear Town. Nothing too special, just some exterior shots of various buildings in Marmora that will have some live action components coposited in later. The shots didn't come out as well as I hoped, the finished animation looks very pixely for some reason. I suspect that the problem is the compression settings of the .avi files I'm creating. I'm probably going to re-render the sequences this weekend once I've got the correct settings worked out.

With 88 just days until the launch and production slowly beginning the first grant for Bear Town is starting to run out. It's not too serious (yet), but I'm running 20% over budget so I'm tightening my belt and trying to work out ways to cut the cost of the first two shoots until I hear back on some of the other funding I'm trying to get. The Bear Town T-shirts should be arriving any day though, so I'm hoping that little fund-raiser will help ease things in the interim.

Posted by Andrew at 3:07 PM | Permalink

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