The Bear Town Production Journal

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Life imitates..?

2009-05-23T05:42:00.003-05:00

One of the most challenging things about creating an entire world for puppets to inhabit is that, well, you have you create an entire world for puppets to inhabit. To that end, as part of the ongoing development work on Bear Town, over the years I've created a lot of production and concept art for various parts of Marmora, the fictional puppetropolis where Bear Town takes place. One of those designs is this street sign concept art, which I think I made in CorelDraw about four years ago.

So I got a little weirded out today reading about the new design of Toronto's street signs (which haven't yet seen in person) on BlogTO and saw this photo:

Maybe if this puppetry thing doesn't pan out I have a future in municipal street sign design?

The Hunt For Gollum

2009-05-05T22:07:00.006-05:00

Watching The Hunt For Gollum - which is quite possibly the most impressive fan film ever made - I can't help but think that if they can do that for just £3,000 (less than $5,000 Canadian) it's totally possible to make Bear Town on a small budget and make it look great.

You can watch the entire film on Daily Motion in HD. Very inspiring.

Back To Puppet Building

2009-04-29T07:31:00.006-05:00

Today is going to be a fun day, I'm back to puppet building for the first time in a long time. I have something of a love/hate relationship with building puppets. I enjoy it as a purely creative outlet, but don't like to be rushed or work on a deadline (this is one of many reasons I generally don't do work-for-hire jobs). It's always nice to come back to it when I have been away from it for a long time though.

I'm not working on Bear Town puppets today, although I am building for something that will hopefully pave the way towards Bear Town. There's something of a proper team - dare I say "dream team" - being assembled for that, but I don't want to risk jinxing the whole thing by saying too much too soon. There have already been enough false starts documented here.

Suffice to say, the next year or two will be busy if all goes according to plan and Bear Town is part of the plan. Here's hoping.

What I've Been Up To

2008-09-10T17:02:00.002-05:00

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

2008-03-03T01:09:00.005-06:00

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.

Simple is always better

2008-02-28T22:21:00.006-06:00

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.

Simple really is better.

Figurenschneider and (no) Antron Fleece

2008-02-03T20:02:00.000-06:00

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:

And more like this:

I'm also thinking I should review an old blog post I wrote for PuppetVision called Rules For Puppet Revolutionaries.

Opening Titles

2008-01-08T10:50:00.003-06:00

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.

The World's Angriest Puppets (original and uncut)

2008-01-01T14:25:00.000-06:00

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.

Old Outtakes

2007-12-29T23:01:00.000-06:00

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.

Thinking About Matte Painting

2007-12-27T11:14:00.000-06:00

This is one of the most incredible examples of digital painting that I've ever seen. It's a panorama of Damen Station in Chicago by Bert Monroy, who specializes in photo realistic digital art. There are no photographic or 3D elements in it whatsoever; Bert did it all with Photoshop and Illustrator. The image above is too small to even begin doing it justice so click here to see a larger image and read an overview that explains how it was created.

My heads hurts just thinking about attempting something like this.

I'm continuing to slowly gear up to begin work on Bear Town again in the new year and thinking about all of the different elements involved, including matte painting (that's how I stumbled across the painting above). I haven't attempted any matte painting for a long time so to get my hands dirty I am tackling a shot that requires mixing 2D and 3D elements to create a virtual set. Nothing nearly as complex as Bert's work, but I thought it would be fun to make it the subject of a little tutorial which should appear here in the next day or so.

Bears in Ill-Fitting Hats

2007-12-12T11:25:00.000-06:00

After spending two years bouncing back and forth between Toronto, Mexico, Alberta and Atlantic Canada I'm settling down in Ontario and gearing up to start work on Bear Town again after a long hiatus. More details will probably follow in a few weeks.

For now I am drawing tremendous inspiration from this great Flickr pool of illustrations of bears in ill-fitting hats.

A Long Overdue Update

2006-09-20T23:58:00.000-05:00

The budget for Bear Town was put together over the summer. After doing a complete breakdown of the film's script and crunching the numbers and then crunching them again I was able to work out that the minium budget the film needs to be completed and still look fairly professional is $235,000. Unfortunately, it looks like realistically that the maximum amount that could be raised to make the movie right now is about $150,000. As much as that might sound like a lot of money, it's just not going to cut it.

Bear Town is a big, complex and expensive project to do with puppets. That's the reason it's taken over a decade to be able to do it. This was a very disappointing conclusion to come to, but I've decided that if I've had to wait this long to make the film I don't want to compromise and waiting a little longer won't be so bad. Over the summer I put most of the Bear Town puppets (both finished and unfinished) in to storage in Canada before coming back to Mexico in mid-August.

The summer has been spent developing a couple of other projects. One hit the web a little while ago, PuppetBuilding.com a new web site devoted entirely to puppet building. It's updated several times a week with puppet building news, information and tutorials. The site also has a Puppet Building Wiki which I hope will become a large collaborative effort to pool puppetry information. I'm doing a video podcast for the site as well, the first installment should be up sometime this weekend.

I can't talk much about the second project just yet, but I'm really excited about it. It's something relatively cheap that I've wanted to do for a long, long time. I've barely done any puppetry since the aborted Bear Town web series in 2004 so I'm eager to get away from the computer and back to what I really love to do.

I'd like to thank everyone who's followed the long, torturous development of Bear Town on the site. Although I doubt it will be updated much for the next year or two it will stay online. As for Omle, Hank and Tumbles and Bear Town? Don't worry, I'll get back to them when the time is right.

Meantime I'm still writing about puppetry daily in the PuppetVision Blog and now PuppetBuilding.com.

See you soon!

Dirty floors and puppets

2006-07-04T12:12:00.000-05:00

I'm back in Toronto for a little while and things got off to a rocky start when I arrived from Texas and at the apartment where I'm staying two weeks ago. It was probably the fithiest, most disgusting apartment I've ever been inside (the gross picture of swept up dirt above does not even begin to do justice to the amount of dirt and cat hair there was in this place. It was supposed to be "fully furnished with all amenities (cable, internet, linens, etc.) but when I arrived there was no T.V. no internet, no bed sheets, towels, etc. When the dirt was pointed out to the fellow looking after the place (the landlord is convienently in California) he recommended going to a nearby dollar store and buying a mop. I actually took pictures of the mess out of fear that people would think I was exaggerating when I told them about it.

Three full cleanings of the apartment later friends are no longer afraid to sit on the furniture.

Housing and internet problems aside, I've been trying to tie up the last few loose ends of my life in Toronto and I'm cleaning out puppet stuff from storage. I've been taking an inventory of furs, fabric and other miscellaneous puppet making stuff and going through all of the previously-built Bear Town puppets deciding what's usable, what needs to be rebuilt and what needs to be thrown out and/or given away.

Above is a box of puppets (actually the contents of several boxes) that I unpacked this week - some discarded pigs and chickens left over from a shoot a few years ago, pet store animals made from the 2004 Bear Town web series, a few small store-bought bear puppets, a granny character and an old version of Professor Jackal, one of Bear Town's villains.

I did a huge purging of puppet stuff when my old puppetry shop had to shut down in 2003, but it's amazing to see the stuff I still have lying around. A good chunk of it I'm packing up and sending to a friend who teaches puppetry workshops for kids, but they can't take all of it so if you're in or near Toronto and looking for fur and puppet building supplies drop me a line at beartown [at symbol] bear-town dot com and I might be able to hook you up.

Packing up and shooting on the virtual backlot

2006-06-10T16:55:00.000-05:00

I'm starting to pack up my workshop in Mexico today.

It's kind of annoying to be doing this because it feels like I just set it up. The problem is that was being provided for the production to use at no cost, which was wonderful, but it won't be available after the summer. Thankfully, I *think* (fingers crossed) another no/low cost space will be available to me when I return mid-August, but I won't be able to see it until then to decide if it's suitable or not.

Most of my work during the past two weeks has been on the film's script. I'm also starting to do a proper visual effects breakdown to get a handle on just how many shots will need digital work and how many puppets, props and sets need to be physically built and how many I can "cheat" using Blender and After Effects.

I just read a great article about Stargate Films, a company that is doing a lot of incredible work creating 3D digital sets or "virtual environments" for TV shows like E.R. and Crossing Jordan. I want to avoid using digital sets for Bear Town as much as possible, but it's incredible reading about all the advances that are being made in that area. One of the main techniques used to create these kinds of effects is called nodal point pan and tile and Joseph Francis has a great tutorial on it here.

One final note, some upgrades to the site are being done over the next week and I may not have Internet access from Monday through Wednesday so the result may be a little more down time, but hopefully not.

Minor updates

2006-06-01T16:46:00.000-05:00

I've updated The Bear Town Guide to Puppet Building Resources with a few new puppet building resources that have come to my attention over the past few months.

I've also recently made some minor changes to the About page and (as I mentioned yesterday) added some new images to the Conceptual Art Photoset on Flickr.

Sketching up ideas

2006-05-31T14:11:00.000-05:00

A sewer/reservoir set for Bear Town designed in SketchUp.

For the past several weeks I've been playing with the new free version of Google's SketchUp to design some of Bear Town's sets and environments and so far I'm very impressed. It's not without it's limitations, but it's a great way to quickly visualize ideas in 3D.

I designed the sewer/reservoir set above in SketchUp. It will be used as a set for a couple of scenes in Bear Town and it will most likely be realized as a digital set. I'm also working on the film's main 3D cityscape and I've been using SketchUp to play with rough designs for various buildings:

I've uploaded larger versions of all of these to the Conceptual Art Photoset on Flickr.

One thing that is particularly annoying is that although SketchUp will import a variety of common 3D file types, at the moment export options in the free version are limited to Google Earth files and image files (the pro version can export to .3ds, .dxf, .max and many other popular formats). Thankfully, a Blender user named J.M. Soler has written a script to import SketchUp's Google Earth files in to Blender which has solved that problem.

Summer self-assignments

2006-05-25T01:56:00.000-05:00

Although I am currently in Mexico, I'm returning to Canada for the summer and trying to plan out my work schedule for the next few months. I've just recently gotten to a point here where my puppet building workshop is more or less set-up so it's not practical or economically feasible to transport a lot of stuff back to Canada, so instead the summer will be spent trying to meet some important benchmarks for Bear Town's development. There are a number of techniques that are going to be used extensively in the film that I want to "test drive" over the summer:

Composite puppet(s) with 2D matte paintings
2 1/2 D Matte Painting
Completely model and finish one 3D virtual set
Seamlessly integrate puppets in to a 3D digital set

Over the past week or so I had the flu so I've taken a bit of a break from puppet building for the film and I've been focused on writing and learning/mastering some of the more advanced features of Blender. I spend a few hours each morning working on the 3D end of things and then from one o'clock until about five each day I've been trying to work on polishing the script.

I'm planning to do a reading/workshop for the film in about six weeks and there is still a lot to do. I'm at a point where the first act is in relatively good shape, but the third and (especially) the second need a lot more work.

Elephant's Dream online today

2006-05-17T15:13:00.000-05:00

Elephant's Dream - the world's first completely open source 3D animated movie - was released online for free today under a Creative Commons license. It's a tremendous artistic achievement. The film's story is a little esoteric in nature and won't appeal to everyone (it reminds me a little of Chris Landreth's surreal 3D film The End), but it's absolutely beautiful. Elephant's Dream was made to showcase the potential of Blender as a production tool and it's done that in spades.

The best part of the Orange Project is that all of the digital assets and production files have also been released under a Creative Commons license so anyone can study, remake and remix the film or portions of it has much as they want. I haven't had time to go through all of the production files yet, but I've already seen a few assets that we'll probably use in Bear Town.

You can download the movie and all of it's production assets for free here.

Speaking of Blender and Bear Town, the first of the 3D virtual sets are coming together. I'm hoping that I'll be able to post some quick test renders in the next week or two.

- - - -

21/05/06 Update: Wikinews has a nice interview with Blender lead developer and Elephant's Dream producer Ton Roosendaal.

A Swarm of Angels

2006-05-09T11:45:00.000-05:00

I read about another interesting open movie project over at Boing Boing today. A Swarm of Angels is an experiment by British filmmaker/writer Matt Hansen to gather 50,000 angel investors paying £25 each to raise $1 million for an independently-produced open movie. Matt's signing up angels in batches: first 100, then 1,000, then 5,000, then 25,000, and finally 50,000. At each milestone the angels participate in different parts of the film production: script development, the trailer, pre-production, production, post-production, etc. It's also exciting to see who's consulting on the project - Creative Commons activist/EFF Fellow Cory Doctorow and Sci-Fi author Warren Ellis.

So far Matt has surpassed his first milestone - 100 angels - and he's now trying to reach 1,000. If you'd like to become one of the angels you can join here.

Again with the bandwidth problem

2006-05-01T10:36:00.000-05:00

The site is back online again (obviously, since you're reading this) after being down for about a week because it once again exceeded it's monthly bandwidth allowance. I'm working on arranging for more bandwidth over the next few days so that doesn't happen again this month.

In other news, I started working full-time on Bear Town puppets last week. I don't have anything that I'm ready to show just yet, but I am documenting the construction process for future puppet building tutorials.

New workshop

2006-04-19T20:26:00.000-05:00

I'm beginning to properly set-up my new puppet building workshop this week. It's not much to look at the moment, just this table in the corner of the room so far and a large closet not shown here that's great for storing supplies and puppets in. The worktable is just an old dining room table room that I'll be covering with cardboard to protect it's sureface.

As for the room itself is about 10' x 10', which is not all that big but fine for me since I am mostly working by myself at the moment. It has a small balcony off to one side where I can use contact cement or anything else that shouldn't be used indoors. Probably the coolest thing about it is that it has it's own well-venilated bathroom complete with a decent-sized shower that I'm very tempted to convert to a spray booth.

I start building puppets for Bear Town more or less full-time beginning Monday.

Cut-out cartoons

2006-04-09T16:01:00.000-05:00

A frame from The Adventures of Billy, Mike & Junior, a cut-out animation created by Ana, Aida, Maria Fernada and Ana Martha in one of my high school animation workshops this week.

I haven't been able to do much Bear Town work over the past week and a half because I was preparing and teaching a workshop for high school students on cut-out animation. It was a lot of work, but I think the 65 students I taught over three days this week really enjoyed it. Each day I explained the stop motion animation process, screened some documentaries about the making of recent stop motion films (Corpse Bride and the recent Dragon Superbowl commercial for United Airlines) and then divided the students up in to groups of five to make short cut out films inspired by Michel Gagne's Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets and The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello.

Here's a couple of the films that the students created (sorry for the .wmv files, we were working with Windows Moviemaker at the school):

"The Descent" (358 KB .wmv)
"The Guy" (195 KB .wmv)

I went back to the school on Friday to drop off a VCD of all the finished animation and several of the students came up to me asking questions about web sites where they could learn more about animation or where to buy supplies to make their own cut-out films. A few parents told me their children had come home after doing the workshop and started experimenting on their own with web cams and copies of Windows Moviemaker, which was really rewarding to hear.

I'm going to be away for most of the next week or so, but after that I'm planning to get back in to doing some serious puppet building work for Bear Town.

Bear Town: Reloaded

2006-03-29T23:41:00.000-06:00

Well, Bear Town is back.

"Back" in the sense that it is once again being actively developed, with a few changes. After spending the past year or so researching, experimenting and working out the details, I've decided to make Bear Town as a feature-length open movie.

What's an open movie?

Basically, an open movie is a film that makes it's footage and other source materials freely available for others to examine, experiment with and even remix in to their own movies. The Blender Foundation's Orange Project is probably the best example of this so far.

What this means is that the finished film will be released over the Internet under a Creative Commons license along with most of the resources (footage, 3D models, After Effects project files, etc.) used to create it. I even plan to release most of the puppet patterns that will be used for the puppet characters for others to learn from and improve on. For more details see the site's newly revised About page.

As you may have noticed, the web site is back online with more on the way. It's been reorganized in to several new sections - About, a Media Gallery, Behind-the-Scenes and the blog. There's no forum for the moment, but I will probably bring that back that some point.

According to the schedule I'm working with right now, Bear Town will be done in about two and half years, in the fall of 2008. The other change I'm making is that as an open movie I want to make the film collaboratively with other artists over the web. Taking this approach is really an experiment and like all experiments, I'm not entirely sure how it will turn out, but I can't wait to see how this develops.

Stay tuned.

Bear-Town.com back up and running

2006-02-28T10:37:00.000-06:00

Bear-Town.com is back up and running. Back with more soon.

Gearing up again

2006-02-27T09:25:00.000-06:00

As promised, early 2006 is here and work on Bear Town is slowly gearing up again. At the moment I'm still primarily working by myself, but hoping that will change in the next 3-4 months. At the moment I'm only able to work on the film one or two days per week and most of my attention is focused on generating new animatics and working on some new matte paintings and 3D models for the film.

I hope to have some new designs, images and maybe a new tutorial or two posted in the near future.

Bear-Town.com out of bandwidth

2006-02-24T12:34:00.000-06:00

I recently updated my Guide to Puppet Building Resources and reposted it to the site. Unfortunately, the site has also exceeded it's monthly bandwidth for February, so all of bear-town.com will be down until March 1st. Sorry for the outage, I'm working on getting more bandwidth to prevent this from happening in the future.

Machinimations

2005-11-29T12:28:00.000-06:00

I've been slowed down on Bear Town yet again by a paid project which is going to involve digital puppetry using a Flash based 3D engine. The idea is sort of to take this concept to the next level. What I'll essentially be doing is creating a 2D system in Flash that looks like 3D, but as part of the research I've been looking more closely at Machinima and starting to wonder about a Machinima-like approach to Bear Town. That would be radically different from what I've been planning all along so I'm not ready to commit to that just yet, but it's intriguing.

Hmmm...

*Note: Missing Posts

2005-11-25T22:05:00.000-06:00

A large section of the blog's archives from this point (mid Nov `05) through mid-May 2004 are missing. This occurred when I swtched from the blog's original publishing software (Movable Type) to Blogger, which I had been using to maintain all of my other blogs.

Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't currently offer an import feature, so I've been forced to manually cut and paste all of the old blog entries manually. Not sure how long this will take, but I'll remove this entry once the archives are restored.

Basil Twist and the Prison Guards of Azkaban

2004-05-14T13:32:00.000-05:00

Still no episode yet, but I've blocked off the rest of the day (and the weekend if necessary) to get it done. Regardless of when I get it online the next episode is scheduled to debut June 1st and I hope to settle in to a regular bi-weekly schedule at that point.

Been so busy I haven't found time to get out to see Van Helsing, which I hear is pretty good. Blockbuster season seems to already be upon us and puppeteers are helping bring to life many of the amazing effects we'll see onscreen this summer. I was surprised to learn awhile ago that they did many of the shots of Doctor Octopus' tentacles in Spider Man 2 practically on the set with a talented team of puppeteers pulling the strings (er, cables) and I read in this month's Cinefantastique that acclaimed American puppeteer Basil Twist - who's done a lot of underwater puppetry work in the past - supervised a series of underwater tests for ILM which were used as motion reference to create the creepy wraith-like Dementors in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

A slight delay

2004-05-04T01:52:00.000-05:00

Started having trouble with my ISP last week so I had to switch to a different service provider the ensuing computer-related chaos has meant that I've fallen a little behind finishing up the first episode. I won't have it online at midnight as originally planned but it should be available beginning sometime in the next twenty-four hours or so.

Gone for a week

2004-04-28T15:27:00.000-05:00

No blog entries this week while I'm busy with Bear Town post-production work. Look for lots of new stuff here and on the main site beginning next Tuesday.

Puppet building Qs & As

2004-04-19T06:37:00.000-05:00

My new Behind The Scenes article has gotten a lot of positive response (thanks everyone) and generated a few puppet building queries:
Hey Andrew!

I have tried to find any material explaining how to make foam latex puppets but found none. I did find techniques of model making and foam latex casting but did not anything specialized on puppets. Can you help me?

- Zachi (Israel)
Hi Zachi,

"Latex" is a confusing subject because there are several kinds available and the terms for each are often mixed up and used interchangeably. "Latex Rubber" is used to make puppets and molds and has a rubbery feel and look to it. I believe Steve Axtell's puppets are made from latex rubber and he's posted some good information about his methods here. You might also want to check out Snap Dragon Puppets' article How We Make A Puppet for latex rubber casting info.

"Foam Latex" is widely used by the FX industry for both puppets and make FX. There's actually a lot of good information on foam latex methods available on the videos in the new Puppet Building Resources article. I haven't seen all of these but they are all highly recommended by a number of respected make-up FX artists. I think all of them are in NTSC and while I'm not sure what video format is used in Israel (PAL? SECAM?) I'd imagine you could find someone locally to convert them for you if that's a problem.

The guy who probably knows more about foam latex puppets than anyone on the planet is Tom McLaughlin. He pioneered the use of foam latex in puppetry and formulated the foam for puppets like Miss Piggy, Yoda, Jabba the Hutt, Babe and lots of other famous characters that I can't recall the names of. He has a good article explaining the basics of how to use foam latex on The Puppetry Homepage and the formula for foam latex he invented (McLaughlin Foam) is widely considered the best in the business. It was actually ripped off in the 80s and became widely distributed without his permission among FX professionals. Thankfully a reformulated (and longer lasting) version of it is now available with his permission commercially through Monster Makers.

I hope that helps!
Hi Andrew,

You mentioned (once) that the very high-end, expensive puppets have (I'm paraphrasing) a, luxury, shall we say, to them, particularly inside. We've been self-taught-building for awhile now and are arriving at styles we're comfortable with and easy to puppeteer. We had the great good fortune to spend some time with Bob Fappiano at his studio and get our hands inside his work, literally, and his methods turned out to be the same as our own, entirely by accident as we had found our own way through experimentation with no mentoring at all. His work feels the same as ours inside - but - I would not term the interior feel as luxurious.

My question to you is, what are the distinguishing interior characteristics that afford the better feel? I want to stress that I'm not asking you to reveal trade secrets, so if you're not comfortable answering this that's perfectly fine! I should add that we now do foam sculpture almost exclusively, which is certainly a factor. The puppets are not soft, "floppy", if you will, squishy guys.

- Laurel

Well I could offend some people by saying this, but I think that the whole "trade secrets" business is just a lot of secretive bull and only propagated by people who are afraid to share information because they don't want other people building or competing with them. It's one thing if someone genuinely invents a special process or technique - like Tom McLaughlin did - and want to keep it secret. That's certainly their right. But people who refuse to share the names of suppliers or general puppet building information are just being selfish and watching out for themselves.

It's been my experience that the really talented people in the business never hesitate to share information because they know the things that really matter - talent, creativity and imagination - can't be taught.

I'm going on a bit of rant here, but most of the tricks with foam puppet construction originated with Jim Henson and the Muppets and I've heard many time from various people who worked for him that Jim Henson always maintained an "open door" policy with his shop and encouraged people to learn, grow and experiment. Everyone who does soft-foam puppets - myself included - is painting on the canvas he invented and can learn from his example.

But that's just my opinion. ;-)

As for your real question, I've never thought of what *exact* things make a puppet more comfortable. I've never seen any of Bob's work and couldn't pull up his site (it's being updated) to take a look so I can't speak to his work or methods really. I do know that he is very well regarded (you have love a guy who was one of Alf's "Personal Assistants"). Myself I just sort of fiddle around with a puppet until it feels good. There's no one right way to build and what I would do is not what 100 other builders might do.

I don't sculpt foam puppets, mostly because I've found they don't have the same flexibility as properly designed puppets patterned from sheet foam and I don't like doing sculpture. I've also found they can be heavy, but that depends in part on the foam you use. I'm not knocking sculpting foam, it's just not my thing. I tend not to like latex puppets either because of the toxic chemicals involved but both Steve Axtell and Noreen Young (among others) do really amazing stuff with latex.

Some of the big differences in the better puppets I've seen and used are weight, flexibility and internal construction. Weight is pretty self-explanatory. You just have to make the puppet as light as possible. It helps to choose light materials. A lot of pro puppets (though not all) are made with microcell foam which is very expensive and hard to find but is extremely light and breathes well. Many puppet builders in theatre are working with what I believe is called carbon fibre, which is also extremely light. Michael Curry's Lion King masks were done with that material and weighed just ounces.

Flexibility is mostly in the choice of materials. I keep several different thickness and densities of foam, leather and gasket rubber lying around and experiment before building something to figure out the best material to make something move. If it's easy to manipulate the puppet it's a lot more comfortable to use. I start with the mouth plate and try to make it as flexible as possible because that's where your hand is and then I sort of build the rest of the puppet around it. Usually if you get the mouth right the rest of the puppet is great.

Internal construction is a very big deal. First of all the puppet should be built inside the way a real personal or animal is built. If you've read my tutorial The Tumbles P. Bear Project (it'll be back online soon) I talk about how arms can be built with dowel rods in a way that mimics bone structure. That way the arms don't (can't) bend in way that is unnatural. Putting boning inside the puppet's body to prevent it from sagging or getting warped helps too. I usually like to sleeve my puppets so that the head turns independently of the body, a subject which I've covered in the updated Tumbles article.

I know it can be frustrating to hear this, but you really just have to experiment and find what works for you, which sounds like exactly what you've been doing. The most important thing in puppet building is design - what the puppet looks like and what the design conveys to the audience (and the puppeteer) about that character. The advantage of a really well designed, comfortable puppet is that a puppeteer can put it on their hand and easily manipulate it to convey a range of emotions and expressions. That's what brings it to life.

If you're arriving at a style you're comfortable with and easy to puppeteer I'd just keep going in that direction and try to hook up with as many people as you can like Bob, most of whom are usually really eager to talk about what they do.

Hello Omle, hello Hank

2004-04-17T15:15:00.000-05:00

After having most of the past week off to work on Bear Town I'm tied up all week next week doing some freelance work which is nice because I'm a little Bear Towned out right now.

This is Omle and Hank, two of Bear Town's three main characters (the other is of course Tumbles). They won't appear in most of the web series exactly as you see them here because I pulled them out this weekend for a bit of a makeover. Their arms are being rebuilt and their bodies are being reinforced. I'm building a new eye mech for Hank (he has to be able to glare at people a lot) because the old one doesn't seem to work properly anymore. I'll also be rebuilding Omle's snout because I've just never really liked the way it fit on my hand. Hope to have most of the work done by Monday so I'm not too frantic next week.

One of our puppeteers had to drop out due to some personal issues. I was luckily able to replace them on short notice when someone I had a trained as a puppeteer last year agreed to step in yesterday. I also found out there's no chance some of the puppets I had ordered for scenes in the first episode will be done in time because of some problems the builder is having so I frantically had to write a new episode to replace it. What I had planned as episode #1 is going to be bumped to #3 or #4 (I haven't decided yet) and the new episodes #1-2 get taped next weekend with a few pick-ups to be shot a week or so later. At some point I'd love to set-up a live webcam during one of the tapings so people can see what goes on but I doubt I'll have that together in time for next week's taping.

Denied!

2004-04-13T21:29:00.000-05:00

Remember that Youth Entrepreneurship program that I was trying to get in to so I could do Bear Town full-time? I picked up a message from the program co-ordinator a couple hours ago telling me that I wasn't accepted. I was kind of down about it for five minutes and then reverted to my Well, I'll gonna go show them! mentality. In fact, probably the best way to motivate me to do something is tell me that I can't do it (I imagine a therapist could have some fun with that statement). I cheered myself up by remembering the famous Einstein quote "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."

I'll probably spend the next hour or so reading the paper and drowning my sorrows in one of those adorable little 237ml mini-cans of Pepsi that seem to be everywhere all of a sudden before I get back to work on the new, improved website. You can see a screen shot of the new design above. I ran in to a few unexpected problems over the weekend, but I should have everything back online very, very soon.

Easter Cometh

2004-04-10T05:14:00.000-05:00

The web site is still down, but I'm hoping to have most of it back up by Monday. I didn't really do much on it today and probably won't Sunday either as I observe Good Friday and Easter. This might be odd since I don't as a general rule attend Church services, but it's the most holy holiday on the Christian calendar and I think observing it despite my non-attendance at religious services is no stranger than celebrating the death and resurrection of the Christian Messiah by painting eggs, eating chocolate and worshipping a giant bunny rabbit.

Of course some Christians take more offence to the whole Easter Bunny thing than others and The Glassport Assembly of God in Glassport, PA seems to have taken the anti-Easter Bunny crusade to a whole new level this year. Apparently inspired by The Passion of the Christ they recently staged a little pageant you might call The Passion of the Bunny.

Somebody better warn Santa not to show up in Glassport this Christmas.

Now I've heard the whole song and dance about eggs and bunnies being symbols of fertility and new life and blah, blah, blah but why not just call a spade a spade and just admit we only adopted a bunch of these customs to convince a few pagans to switch religions and to help Laura Secord sell a little more chocolate every Spring?

And speaking of switching religions...though brothers, myself and most of my family were all raised in the United Church of Canada (an amalgamation of Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational Union churches and Canada's largest Protestant denomination). Few of us are still members today and this weekend my brother Brian becomes the latest to officially switch teams this weekend when he's confirmed as a Catholic so he's able to get married by the church in June.

I've retained a strong interest in theology and I'm fascinated by different aspects of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Shinto (Japan's dominate religion). Like many people I'm also thoroughly disgusted with the way religion seems to be constantly invoked and corrupted for economic and political purposes and I may deal with some of that - in a non-preachy way - in an episode of Bear Town at some point.

Though it's not specifically about Easter, I thought that today's Morning Improv made a great, Zen-like comment on Christianity that's completely in line with my way of thinking. Someone on the Morning Improv board summed it up best:

"Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than
standing in a barn makes you a tractor."
As I said I don't attend services very often anymore, but I do occasionally volunteer to teach puppetry workshops for a few friends who are active in Christian puppetry. I must admit that I was ignorant of the whole Christian puppetry phenomenon (traditionally based in the southern U.S. "Bible Belt") until about five years ago when a Ministry in South Africa licensed a show I had written based on Aesop. I was curious, did a little research and was quickly amazed by the huge number of Christian Puppeteers out there.

Few people realize that Christian Puppetry is a tradition that goes back almost 1,000 years. The word marionette - which means specifically a string puppet in English but is a general term for all types of puppets in French - literally means "little Marys" and originated during the Dark Ages when the church would use puppets to stage passion plays and teach biblical lessons to the largely illiterate masses.

Learning Mambo

2004-04-03T18:14:00.000-06:00

Quickly getting the hang of Mambo - it really is an incredibly powerful and easy to use system - so the web site may be back up and running sooner than I thought.

Long time no blog (again)

2004-03-30T04:57:00.000-06:00

I got a big surprise this morning - *just* as I was headed out the door to get myself a new health card the phone rang I was told that I had been accepted in to stage two of a youth entrepreneurship program that I applied to for help marketing Bear Town over the next year. This stage of the application process for the program or the program is sort of like a entreurneal version of Survivor - forty five people do a week of workshop and are eliminated until only fifteen are left on the island. So I'll spend much of this week attending five days of seminars, which began today (Monday). Over the course of the week I have to complete a feasibility study and present it in an interview on Friday. By the Easter weekend I'll know if I've make it to the final round of the program.

When I got home from the first secession more good news was waiting for me. Two major publications are interested in doing stories on Bear Town! Now this is very exciting (especially since the series hasn't even started yet) but it also just rachets up the pressure on me to get everything done and done well.

I spent most of tonight working on the new design for the website, which I'll begin rolling out in about two weeks. I'm redoing the site in PHP (via Mambo Open Source) and the new animated menu will use Flash instead of Java which should solve a few problems people have been experiencing. I'm also in the final stages of testing the new BT Community Forum and I expect to have it back up and running again about the same time as the new site goes online.

Long time no blog

2004-03-25T01:54:00.000-06:00

Wow, it's almost been a week since my last entry. Blog entries may be few and far between over the next month or so while I'm getting ready for the first Bear Town shoot in a few weeks. Sometime soon I should have the promised pics of Bluie that were taken at the end of my 48 hour puppet building attempt, but I've been holding off uploading them because my computer has been tied up with rendering backgrounds and animation for the series.

Tonight I whipped up a batch of those spiffy blog stickers everyone seems to be using these days. You can use the stickers to link to the blog's new URL www.bear-town.com/blog/ (edit: the URL updated 02/10/05). Pick the button that best suits the design of your site or if you need one in another colour email me at beartown [at] bear-town dot com and I'll make a custom one for you. Be sure to notify me if you link to the site; I'll be sure to add a reciprocate link next time I update the links page.

Many people have been writing and posting in various discussion forums over the past few months asking when I'm going to update The Tumbles P. Bear Project and the answer is, well, I still don't know. I've been continuing to document the whole construction process and take lots of pictures as I've worked on the puppet and I plan to go back soon and add more information to the existing articles and post the two final ones but I probably won't have time to post anything until sometime in mid-May at the earliest.

A puppet in 48 hours, part 5

2004-03-11T01:50:00.000-06:00

11:50 p.m.

Ouch. Forgot just how long it takes to make a puppet's arms properly. Below you can see Bluie's hands/paws/whatevers before they were glued together earlier tonight.

The antron fleece was dry this morning and Bluie's head and body are ready to be covered. I'm in the final stages of finishing the arms right now. I don't know if with everything that's come up since I started if I'll actually be finished by 11:45 tomorrow night, but if nothing else I should have all the foam work done, the fleece patterned and a good chunk of Bluie sewn together.

Before I get back to work I wanted to pass along that Grow the spiffy Japanese game I was telling people about seems to have been moved to a different server. You can now find it online here.

A puppet in 48 hours, part 4

2004-03-10T04:45:00.000-06:00

2:45 a.m.

So I found out I won't be able to get 48 hours of puppet building in straight. Turns out I'll be doing a few hours of non-puppetry work part of tomorrow (well, today now) and Thursday. Since I'll be spending about 10 hours working when I planned to be building to compensate for the lost time I've decided to allow myself until 11:45 Thursday night to finish Bluie instead of 1:45 in the afternoon, which is technically 48 hours from when I started.

I would have had an update posted sooner, but the battery in my digital camera died around 10 o'clock and I had to wait for it to partially recharge.

I had to dye antron fleece tonight so I would be able to start covering the puppet tomorrow. It's hanging to air dry right now.

Also made the mouthplate and glued it to the top of the foam skull so most of the foam build-up is done. I just have to make Bluie's jaw and line the inside of the mouthplate with black felt. I may also make a few minor alterations to the head.

Next I painted Bluie's nose with black acrylic paint. The nose is made from a halved golf practice ball. About a month ago I lucked out and found a bunch of these really cheap at Wal-Mart.

Well that's all for tonight. I'll have more pics and another update early tomorrow evening.

A puppet in 48 hours, part 3

2004-03-09T22:53:00.000-06:00

8:53 p.m.

Didn't manage to find any reticulated foam while I was out so I decided to just add an extension on to the body I made earlier. I've glued some plastic boning in to the neck of the body and next I'll be reinforcing the rest of the body. Then I plan to begin dying some antron fleece so it will dry enough to cover the puppet tomorrow.

Next update before midnight EST.

A puppet in 48 hours, part 2

2004-03-09T18:02:00.000-06:00

4:02 p.m.

So far so good. I've finished the polyfoam "skull" for Bluie's head. Normally I would cut the foam pieces out more carefully so the black outlines I traced on to the foam from the pattern I made aren't visible, but I was rushing and didn't feel like recutting them. My first attempt at the body didn't quite work out so I'm headed out to find a hardware store where I can get some more reticulated foam.

I'll have another update and more pics 8ish.

A puppet in 48 hours, part 1

2004-03-09T15:45:00.000-06:00

1:45 p.m.

OK so the ever-present-and-increasingly-annoying-countdown on the main page tells me there is just 55 days until Bear Town debuts and I've got some serious puppet building ahead of me. So I've decided to challenge myself - I'm going to try to build one of the puppets from scratch in 48 hours.

That's right - one puppet. 48 hours. Completely from scratch.

I actually know people who can build puppets in two days or less, which I'm in awe of. I just don't work that fast - I started working on Tumbles last summer and I'm still not quite finished yet! But I'm going to try. I'll be rebuilding a character named Bluie who was originally built for the aborted Bear Town attempts in `94 and `96. Bluie's sort of a flunkie for Bear Town's main bad guy, Big Bear and will probably be showing up in the fourth episode, which we'll be shooting mid-April.

The only things I won't be making over the next two days are his sweater (which I had someone knit for me over the past few weeks) and his shirt, which I'll be swiping from the second Bluie puppet that I built.

I've got no patterns to work from. Just the pics you see above and the two old Bluie puppets themselves, the newest of which has a misshapen head and was very badly made. I'm actually really partial to the original puppet, as ratty as he is after all these years. You can seem him in action briefly doing a funny walkthrough the background of this clip in the Video Vault.

Keep in mind that I may very well fail to finish him in time. I have no intention of producing a bad or akward puppet just for the sake of finishing in 48 hours. I'll post updates every few hours as I go. Look for the first one around 4 p.m. EST today.

While I get to work here's some other stuff to mull over...

My little "48 Hour Puppet Building Project" was inspired in part by the 24 Hour Comic Challenge invented by Scott McCloud, which puppeteer/cartoonist Steve Troop recently took - check out his attempt here. Steve has also just teamed up with 'N' Toonz to offer custom Melonpool sculptures for just $35!

On the puppet building front on the other side of the globe, Isreali MC member Tztz recently won a local costume competition with this very cool, very bizzare creature which was no doubt inspired by those odd knights (I can't remember what they're called) in Labyrinth. Lots more pictures of Tztz's latest creation can be found in this directory.

Missed one deadline, working on another

2004-03-03T03:48:00.000-06:00

I was toying with the idea of applying for a Canada Council grant to help fund Bear Town. I knew the deadline for film and new media project grants was coming up fast, but I was so busy trying to get my PC fixed for the past two weeks I didn't get around to checking the deadline for the next round of funding until today only to find out that applications were due on Monday - d'oh!

It's OK though...getting one of those grants for something like Bear Town is a long shot at best. If I do decide to apply for the next round of grants in the fall Bear Town should still be eligable anyway. I'm actually getting ready to make a pitch tomorrow that - if it's successful - could mean that for the next year I'll be doing the series almost full time! Fingers are crossed, I'll let everyone know how it turns out.

Computers are cruel

2004-02-29T18:38:00.000-06:00

I finally got my newly upgraded PC working and then just as I made my last blog entry the new hard drive failed! Fortunately I had most of the new system saved on my old hard drive, but I still lost about two days worth of rendered animation I hadn't backed-up yet as well as some titles I created last week. As soon as I can afford it I've decided to pick up one of those spiffy Maxtor One-Touch drives to make the whole back-up process simpler.

I keep forgetting to mention what looks to be a great animated film in the works from Brian Taylor, Rust Boy. Brian recently posted several finished shots from the film in his diary (click on the Feb 17th entry for a link to them) and you can check out all kinds of storyboards, conceptual art and work-in-progress footage from the film at the Rust Boy site. You can also help support Brian's project by buying a copy of the Rusy Boy Book.

66 days to go

2004-02-27T21:00:00.000-06:00

Just over two months until Bear Town debuts and I'm busy, busy, busy. I finally got my (upgraded) PC back this week. Thanks to my new 1.7 ghz processor (a little slow I know, but a big step up from my old 266mhz Pentium) I'm cranking out an average of ten seconds of CG a day and so far it looks great. I'm working on the CG/animated backgrounds and environments that are needed for the first few webisodes. The 3rd and 4th episodes are especially CG dependent.

Having the computer back also means I can do a final "polish" on the first few webisodes before sending the scripts out to the puppeteers. I'm considering postponing my first planned puppet shoot in March by about four weeks. This means I'll have to shoot two weekends back to back in mid-April to stay on schedule. I'm still a little behind with puppet building even considering the extra time this will give me. I figure I'll have to finish three puppets per week for the next six weeks to be ready to shoot. Fortunately all but one or two are already started.

There's a few films coming out later this year that I'm really looking forward to. Rumour has it that the opening sequence of this summer's Spider Man 2 will feature drawings by Alex Ross, who's illustration work has influenced much of the early conceptual art for Bear Town.

Still sans computer

2004-02-19T18:38:00.000-06:00

Despite still being PCless I did manage to finally update the blog box on the main page. Eventually I'll get to get around to coding it so it updates automatically.

I was supposed to have most of this week off to work on Bear Town but I seem to busy working on everything but. I have several puppets (yes, including Tumbles) almost finished, just in need of having their body taken in a bit or having a few eyes stuck. I'm also finally getting around to writing several funding proposals that are due next month.

Sans computer, day 6

2004-02-18T18:30:00.000-06:00

I know my PC has been broken too long when I'm on a first name basis with some of the staff at the Webfusi@n Internet cafe on Yonge Street here in Toronto. I can't help but be amused by the grammer on some of the signs in this place. Like the one on the washroom door that reads "Man Washroom." It's like being in Japan all over again.

Sigh.

Sans computer, day 5

2004-02-17T18:22:00.000-06:00

I should have a working PC by tomorrow. I hope. Checking email and writing blog entries at Internet cafes is getting pretty old quick.

Sans computer, day 4

2004-02-16T22:03:00.000-06:00

As I mentioned before, I've been getting my PC upgraded and repaired. It's been quite the little adventure and I'm told that still shouldn't expect to have a working PC back until Wednesday. I won't bore everyone will all the details, but suffice to say I've spent most of the past four days running back and forth exchanging computer components and resisting the urge to pummel Future Shop employees with heavy, blunt objects.

Still, it's not all bad, I've had a chance to read Bill Bryson's excellent A Short History of Nearly Everything which had been sitting on the shelf for months.

I also discovered Kellee's blog on the weekend and read some musings about the potential of digital puppetry, which led me to the web site of puppeteer-turned computer animator Emre Yilmaz. It's actually pretty amazing how many people go back and forth between puppetry and computer animation, including the always lovely Karen Prell and her husband Nien Nunb (known in galaxies not quite so far away as Mike Quinn).

Sans computer

2004-02-13T17:15:00.000-06:00

My PC is in the shop being repaired and upgraded so as I check my email at a local Internet cafe I thought I would share a little news and respond to a few questions...

Hi Andrew,

Wow, I just went to your website. Very cool! I have to admit I don't know much about computers and the serialized online film process is new to me.
How does a person see your series? I really liked seeing how you build with the foam. I put your site on my "favorites" and plan to visit again. Your puppetry work sounded interesting/travel. Do you work alone? Are you a member of Puppeteers of America? Just interested in a fellow puppeteer.

- Becky

Thanks! I'm glad you like the site. "Serialized online film" is basically just a fancy way of saying that Bear Town will be a film that is released in segments or "chapters" or "webisodes" (someone really has to decide on the definative terminology for this kind of thing) that can be downloaded over the `net either as a Quicktime file or possibly streamed via Windows Media.

Every two weeks beginning May 4th a new segment will be posted and there will likely be two versions of each segment available - a low-res version for dial-up users and a high-res version for people with high speed connections. The newest segment will always be free but I'm considering charging a small fee of 25 or 50 cents to access old episodes, which would be paid via the Bitpass micropayment service. The first 24 episodes or so are actually taken from a screenplay I wrote over the past few years so I plan to re-edit and remaster them on DVD as one feature length movie sometime mid-2005ish.

Some people would call Bear Town a "web series." Although I'm not aware of many other puppetry series, there's a surprising number of web shows and serials out there. If you want to find more Epiguide is a good place to start looking.

Right now I suppose I technically work "alone" although I usually collaborate with a lot of different puppeteers both in my own work and when I'm hired to design, direct or consult for other companies. For many years I worked with Shawn Hazelton and Brenda Tan through Omle Media. Brenda went on to work in the business side of the film/TV industry and Shawn currently lives in Japan so we haven't done anything together for a few years. Brenda is coming back for Bear Town and I'm hoping Shawn will be available too. There are several other talented puppeteers who will be contributing to Bear Town as well once the camera rolls.

I'm not currently a member of Puppeteers of America, mostly because everytime I go to the bank I forget to buy a US dollar money order to pay for membership. Despite my forgetfullness, I'd encourage anyone who's interested in puppetry to join the PofA. As I'm sure you know, their quarterly magazine The Puppetry Journal is excellent and the organization is a great way to network and meet other puppeteers.

Another legal question that I think might be a gray area..... I have a customer who would like to have a puppet in the likeness of a musician. I don't believe that is a copyright issue..... but am I responsible for what someone might do with that musicians "likeness" ? Could I be sued if a client used my replica of "Michael Jackson" and started using it to molest little boy puppets?

- Michele

Well, that inserted an image in to my head that I certainly didn't need. LOL

I'm not a copyright lawyer, but I think you're legally in the clear on that one. Unfortunately, in America it seems you can be sued for just about anything (as this proves) but I don't think they'd have much of a case here. It sounds like what your client wants to do would be considered "parody" which is supposed to be protected as free speech in the United States, Canada and almost any other place that isn't ruled by heinious, overbearing, evil military dictator types.

Can't wait to see your new puppets. Will you post pics on your website?
How's the developement for the show? Got some episodes ready?

- Mathieu

I plan to put photos of a lot of the main Bear Town characters on the site over the next 4 - 6 weeks as they start to get finished. Allegedly, I have no freelance work over the next week so I'm hoping to get a lot of puppet building done.

No episodes are done yet, but work on Bear Town is continuing on a couple of fronts. I have a lot of puppets to finish; not one is completely done yet but several are very, very close. I'm beginning to render some of the CG backgrounds and animation I'll be compositing green screen footage of the puppets in to later. I'm hoping to be able to set up the shoot so that the puppets will be roughly keyed in to the backgrounds in real-time as they're peformed. That way when the puppeteers see their characters in the monitor they'll see them in a real environment rather than just against a sea of green or blue. I'm scheduled to start shooting in mid to late March, with additional location shooting planned for April.

Grrr!!

2004-02-09T01:59:00.000-06:00

I originally wrote this entry much more eloquently yesterday, but when I tried to post it the web site decided to crash. That was very annoying...

Leafing through Puppet Mania Friday I noticed that John Kennedy has a web site for his puppetry company, Hands In Art. The site has a few interviews and articles about John and his work and you can also purchase autographed copies of Puppet Mania and kits to make the "Banana Buddies" featured in his book.

Continued animating and rendering CG shots for Bear Town today, but most of the weekend was taken up with preparations for a little birthday bash here Saturday and I did a brisk business in Bear Town T-shirts at the party. I plan to launch a Cafepress shop with Bear Town Ts soon, but the black fundraiser T-shirt seen on the left will only be available directly from me since Cafepress can't reproduce it. Email me if you're interested in getting one. The cost is $20 Cdn each or about $15 US plus shipping and all proceeds go towards funding Bear Town.

I've been getting a lot of puppetry questions via email lately, so I'm going to try and do something new and answer them in the blog for the benefit of others:

Got a question for ya. I finally went legit with the puppet thing and got an occupational license this year and established my company in the eyes of Uncle Sam. Was wondering what method you use to keep your books for tax purposes...do you guys do taxes up there? I'm looking for any advise or sharing of how you do things because I'm awful when it comes to the paperwork....I just wanna make the puppets!

- Michelle

Wow, do we have taxes in Canada!! It's awfully expensive to run a snowy, socialist, universal-healthcare-filled-Bush-free paradise like Canada and we pay for it dearly with some of the highest tax rates in the western world! To answer your question though, I use the Canadian version of Quickbooks for most of my accounting needs. I believe you can find an equivalent product suitable for the US market through Inuit.

It's been my experience that it's definitely worthwhile to pay to sit down with an accountant for at least a one hour secession if you're starting a business. An accountant who has specific experience dealing with artists is best, but any accountant who handles small business should be able to explain what you should be doing and why on the financial side of things. It may cost a little bit up front, but you'll end up saving a lot in the long run.

Hey! I was wondering how you made Tumbles' hands so smooth. Did you carve them?

- Shane

Actually, Tumbles' hands are each made from two pieces of soft 1/2" foam. The edges are glued and once the glue is tacky they're pinched together which creates the smooth, rounded look you're referring to. I describe the process in greater detail in The Tumbles P. Bear Project.

If you've got a puppetry, Bear Town or filmmaking-related question email me and if I have the answer I'll be happy to share.

Puppet Mania!

2004-02-05T15:07:00.000-06:00

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.

Dammit Jim, I'm a Trekkie not a filmmaker!

2004-01-29T03:51:00.000-06:00

While I've been recuperating from a cold the past few days I've gotten hooked on the web series Hidden Frontier which I discovered via the folks at EpiGuide, who added Bear Town to their web series directory last week. Hidden Frontier is fan fiction taken to the next level - a homemade Star Trek series made by fans for fans. I've been fascinated by a lot of the episodes because they are utilizing many of the production techniques I'll be using to make Bear Town.

To be honest, the acting on Hidden Frontier is pretty wooden and the dialogue feels forced and is full of technobabble, but they do a really good job combining green screen shots of the cast with stock shots of various Star Trek sets. The highlight of the series is definately the CG work, most of which has a nice cinematic feel to it. I've haven't totally bought in to their blanket-draped alien villains, but that Chief Lefler (Kelly Jamison) is a hottie!

Lotsa links

2004-01-21T04:38:00.000-06:00

Getting closer and closer to having some puppets actually completed for the first Bear Town shoot, which is an encouraging thing. I've swore to myself that I won't be spending the night before the first day of shooting frantically finishing puppets and with about seven weeks left there's still a slim chance that's actually possible.

There seems to be puppetry stuff bursting out all over the `net this week. The Clintons went to visit Avenue Q recently; both Broadway.com and Rick Lyon's site have pics. Ryan reports that the first of the Whoopi's Littleburg pre-school specials just aired on Nick Jr. with two more coming in March and July. The puppets are by Toronto's talented Grogs Inc. and I've been anxious to see these shows ever since I first saw the characters being designed at the Grog shop a year ago.

Elsewhere in the puppet building world, Scott Radke recently finished these cool shoes for a special exhibit down in his neck of the woods.

Finally, I want to thank Melissa, who read that I was shopping at Bear City for some small costumes for Bear Town and wrote to tell me about Build-A-Bear Workshop in Mississauga, part of a chain of stores that sell customized Teddy Bears and Teddy Bear accessories. Their selection is vastly superior (sorry Bear City!!) and best of all they have locations in Canada, The U.S. and the UK too. Click here for a full list of store locations worldwide.

Bitpass bits

2004-01-16T19:03:00.000-06:00

Comics fans should check out part two of Scott McCloud's innovative online comic The Right Number which debuted Thursday. In case you missed the first installment, TRN uses a Flash-based "picture in picture" transition effect that Scott first proposed a few years ago in his book Reinventing Comics. Clever stuff. Downloading the comic costs 25 cents via Bitpass, the innovative micropayment service Scott has championed that I plan to use for Bear Town.

Speaking of which, looks like Bear Town won't be the first episodic online series on the web using Bitpass. That honour goes to Dark Commandos, an award-winning vampire adventure series.

Big Bears & Kung Fu Puppets

2004-01-12T02:34:00.000-06:00

I spent most of Saturday running around gathering some supplies and props. Sunday was a fairly productive day too. I'm very excited because Big Bear - Bear Town's main villain - is finally starting to take shape.

So far all that's really been done is a foam build-up (the eyes and nose seen here are temporary) but it's already a huge improvement over the old puppet. Actually, that puppet wasn't really so bad, except that when he turned sideways he was completely flat! Needless to say, this new improved Big Bear is designed to be quite a bit bulkier and intimdating than his predecessor.

I also managed to make a new pair of foam puppet heads for two Asian women I'll need. I had made some heads for them out of Styrofoam balls months ago, but I decided they were too small so I made larger ones this weekend. The most time-consuming part of the whole process was wrapping the finished Styrofoam heads carefully in cloth tape so I can spray glue antron fleece on them (most forms of contact cement will corrode styrofoam so I've found a protective layer of tape works wonders).

Speaking of Asian puppets, I read this article Saturday in the Taipei Times (don't ask me how that ended up happening) about puppetry in Taiwan. I was first exposed to Taiwanese puppetry when I worked on a show that was doing a national tour of Taiwan a few years ago and I've tried to follow the work that's going on there as best I could ever since.

One of the coolest companies in Taiwan is Pili Puppet Theatre. It's run by Chris Huang, a member of Taiwan's Huang family puppet dynasty. Chris is all but unknown here, but he produces incredibly popular TV shows in Asia that use traditional Chinese glove puppets. They have even produced a feature length film using glove puppets and some pretty good CGI called Legend of the Sacred Stone. It's hard to find this on video & DVD outside of Asia, but it is out there - usually in Chinese language video shops or stores that specialize in genre or cult movies. If you like martial arts and puppets, you'll love this!

What a week!

2004-01-09T15:04:00.000-06:00

Wow, this has been one of the most stressful weeks I've had in a long time. It's a lot of scheduling problems and other work-related stuff that has me stressed and not really Bear Town, though that little coundown script I added to mainpage is has become an unpleasant reminder of just how little time I have left to start shooting.

I had big plans to get lots accomplished this week. That didn't happen. Now - assuming that I actually have some free time this weekend - I'll be doing some final editing on the scripts for the first few Bear Town webisodes so I know which puppets and sets have to be built and in what order. I've realized that I will probably be shooting the 4th, 5th and 6th webisodes first, simply because they require the fewest number of puppets.

I got this little religious nugget via email yesterday:

"Blessed are those who acknowledge there is only one God
and have quit applying for His position."
And just to clear up any misunderstanding, I want to be clear it's not me producing The Lady from Sockholm it's a production company in Atlanta called Kittyboy Creations Inc. I had got a couple emails from people who were confused about that. My bad, I should have made everything more clear in my last Blog entry.

Think different

2004-01-04T13:58:00.000-06:00

I've occupied myself for the past few days playing a marathon game of Risk. Not only did I manage to take back the Ural, but (as you can see from my swarm of red armies on the board) I quickly built myself an empire that stretched from North America to India and mercilessly crushed my two ten year-old opponents!

The countdown to Bear Town's official launch has begun! Barring any unforseen problems (and I never count those out) Bear Town's first "webisode" Side Street Stick-Up will be available online at midnight EST Tuesday, May 4th. That's exactly one year to the day the site went online and nearly ten years since I originally conceived of Bear Town and got started in puppetry.

So I'm excited, but also dreading the next few months which will be filled with frantic puppet building, set construction and writing. Right now I'm planning to post new episodes bi-weekly and I should have five or six in the can by May. How long I can keep up with this kind of demanding schedule remains to be seen, but it should be interesting - and exhausting!

I'm happy to report that another interesting puppet film is about to go in to production...The Lady From Sockholm: A Sock Puppet Film Noir Feature begins shooting in less than two weeks. They're also looking for lots of help with the shoot later this month from folks in the Atlanta area so if you're in Georgia and able to lend them a hand consider giving the producers a shout at info@sockholm.com.

Over the weekend I came across this great little site that has archieved some of Apple's best TV commercials. Apple's most famous commercial was their landmark ad 1984, but my personal favorite has always been the original ad for their "Think Different" campaign in the late 90s.

The commercial is simple and effective. Richard Dreyfuss reads a simple poem over old film clips of some of the 20th century's most original and creative minds including Einstein, Martin Luther King, Picasso, Alfred Hitchcock and others. The subtle commercial message here is of course that we're supposed to believe that Apple "thinks different" just like all of these people did and so creative people should use their products. Now I'm not usually a big fan of TV commercials, but I love this ad because it's as much an ode to creativity as it is an attempt to sell computers.

A high-res version of the ad can be downloaded from here, or dial-up users can see a smaller, lower-res copy on this site.

The full poem written for the campaign (which isn't completely read in this ad) is:

Here's to the crazy ones.

The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules,
and they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, quote them, disagree with them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them...
about the only thing you can't do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

And while some see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Think different.

New Year, New T-Shirts

2003-12-31T03:07:00.000-06:00

Ah, the saga of the Bear Town T-shirts. I originally ordered some back around November as samples. I had gotten a really good deal, but when the shirts arrived they were awful! Most of the lettering was already beginning to peel and flake off after just one wash so I decided to go shopping for another supplier.

I finally found a good one in downtown Toronto. Their deal isn't quite as good, but the quality of their work is much, much better. When the shirts finally arrive in two or three weeks I'll selling them locally here for around $20 Cdn (about $15 US) to friends, family, strangers, etc. as a Bear Town fundraiser.

I can hardly believe 2003 is over already! While it wasn't the best year for me personally, it was a very good year for puppetry. The mainstream media finally seemed to be catching on to the idea that, yes, puppets are for adults too. Just recently, Entertainment Weekly named Avenue Q the #1 Broadway show of 2003 and yesterday Boston radio station WBUR's Here and Now featured this segment on puppetry's "comeback" with Karen Larsen, Artistic Director of the Puppet Showplace Theater in Massachusetts.

It wasn't all good news in puppetry this year though. One of the year's low points was the announcement of the impending sale of the famous Henson townhouse in New York and the final shut down of the NY Muppet workshop. Sadly, most of the incredible Jim Henson Company's puppet designers and builders have lost their jobs in recent years. One such talent is James Wojtal, who recently posted a few samples of his work online.

Well, that's a wrap for this year - see you in 2004!

Back Online, Back to Work

2003-12-24T08:22:00.000-06:00

Now that the website is up and running again I can get back to puppet building. I haven't gotten much actual building done the past few weeks but I have been busy picking up all the supplies and costuming I'll be needing. It's always a challenge to find puppet-sized clothing and props; I'm a bit of a stickler for realism and highly realistic/detailed costuming and props so I was fortunate to find Bear City, a new store that just opened at the Scarborough Town Centre. It's filled will all sorts of teddy bear-scaled clothes, everything from boots to shoes to police uniforms...they even have tiny little boxer shorts!

I have some new video clips posted in The Video Vault. These are from the aborted 1996 short film version of Bear Town. This was pretty much a student film from eight years ago so I'm not crazy about the look of puppets themselves, but the videos are still worth a quick peek if you're interested and have a decent Internet connection. The files are only 160x120 but they're pretty hi-res (7 - 12 mb each).

Well, that's all for now...have a happy ho-ho-ho everyone!

Good news, bad news

2003-12-20T07:25:00.000-06:00

First the good news - the site is back online! I apologise to everyone that the site was down for such a long time. It's a bit of a long, complicated story (as these things usually are) but basically my hosting service was suspended because the credit card info with my hosting company was not up to date and I didn't get the notification that my annual payment hadn't been processed in time. Normally I would have gotten everything fixed right away but between performing a number of shows at work and getting sick with the flu and a nasty chest cold time just sort of flew by and before I knew the site had been down for over a month.

Now the bad news - unfortunately the whole site was deleted from our server. I had most of the site backed up, but the files associated with the new forum was lost along with all of my blog entries from October 20th onwards. I guess that'll teach me to back-up more often!

In other (good) news, Muppet Central recently posted this editorial I wrote a few months ago about October's Unseen Work of Jim Henson event at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York.

I managed to attend The Lord of the Rings "Trilogy Tuesday" - the special one day only screening of the entire LotR trilogy - this week at the Paramount in Toronto. I hadn't seen the special editions of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers and it was a real treat to see them up on the big screen. If you haven't seen the extended editions yet, check them out. I always thought the original theatrical cuts of the LotR films felt too rushed but the extended versions are much better paced and fill you in on a lot of the back story if you haven't read Tolkien's novels.

We also got this spiffy film frame collectible. New Line Cinema asked Sideshow/WETA (the collectibles arm of Peter Jackson's own WETA Workshop) to create the film frame as an exclusive for Trilogy Tuesday
participants. Each frame contains one unique frame of film from each of the three movies.

Speaking of Lord of the Rings, a few weeks ago I picked it up a copy of Gollum: A Behind the Scenes Guide to the Making of Gollum the new book by Andy Serkis, who provided Gollum's voice and movement in the trilogy. Gollum was created using motion capture, a rapidly emerging technique in filmmaking that is really just another branch of puppetry.

Although the book's a little dull in places - as Andy himself points out most actor's memoirs tend to be - I still thought it was a interesting read. Andy spends most of the time describing how he used his voice and mannerisms to turn Gollum in to a fully realized character, which was very interesting from a puppeteer's perspective. I also liked that this book is much more personal than a lot of "behind the scenes" books tend to be.

More doors

2003-05-29T22:31:00.000-05:00

Right now I have this old door currently sitting in the middle of my kitchen. Why is it there? I found it on the street and it's the perfect width to fit the doorways of the main apartment set in Bear Town. To keep costs down, I plan to make this set a redress of a house set built (but not used) for a TV Pilot I worked on last year. Of course the door in question is "human scale" right now so it will have to be cut down to "puppet-scale" (I'll cut it in half so it will become two doors). It was a great find!

I was on the subway system again today and discovered that the Downsview station would be ideal to shoot puppets in if I need a station for the finale. The layout of the stairs and walkways there is visually interesting and the real attraction is that the way they are designed it's possible to make puppets appear to be in scale with their surroundings in-camera. It's something I'll be keeping in mind as I continue to refine the subway sequence in the script, although I'm still not sure it's feasible to shoot on TTC property.

In a fit of inspiration just before I got off the train there I quickly jotted down all the warning messages posted for safety on the subway doors. I have an idea to incorporate the messages in a few a visual jokes during Bear Town's subway chase. I'm also planning to do some more writing tonight. I have about ten pages left to write to finish the rough draft of the screenplay, hopefully I'll be done before the end of this Saturday.

Damn you Charlize Theron!

2003-05-28T19:59:00.000-05:00

Charlize Theron ruined my day today. I was having a perfectly good day today until — ironically enough — I was on the subway and thinking about the subway chase sequence in Bear Town when lo and behold I open up the Arts and Entertainment section of the newspaper she was on the cover of the Entertainment section along with an article explaining how she enjoyed stunt driving in The Italian Job, taking a Mini zipping through L.A.'s subway tunnels! Subway tunnels! What's so upsetting about subway tunnels? Well, that was one of my ideas for the opening of the subway chase sequence in Bear Town!

Hollywood takes all the good ideas! Oh well, I probably couldn't have afforded to shoot it anyways...

Door Open Toronto 2003

2003-05-25T01:56:00.000-05:00

I did check out Doors Open Toronto today and did a a lot of photography that I plan to use for more conceptual art. Went to The Carlu, but it was closed. I didn't check its hours in my event guide until I got there and realized it was only open tomorrow. A lot of other people were there who made the same mistake. If I have time I may head down there again today. I did see a lot of other interesting buildings to photograph and went to the CBC Broadcast Centre and discovered the CBC Museum has a number of puppets from it's history on display including Muppets from Sesame Park (the Canadian version of Sesame Street), Mr. Dressup and The Friendly Giant, two CBC shows I grew up watching. I photographed most of them for the benefit of the folks over at the Muppet Central.

Today I also completed this conceptual illustration of a train barn that will likely figure prominently in Bear Town's finale.

Doors opening

2003-05-23T00:30:00.000-05:00

Not much exciting to report for the past week. I have been continuing to rewrite, condense, and reorder scenes to make the Bear Town screenplay as "lean and mean" as possible. At the moment the script is 97 pages and I think I can remove a few more pages of dialogue. My ultimate goal is 110 pages (for a film that runs 1:50) and with only 10 - 20 more pages left to write I think I'm very close to hitting that target.

Saturday I plan to check out Doors Open Toronto (a great event) to try to get some ideas for potential locations for Bear Town. Every year, for one weekend in May Doors Open Toronto opens up some of Toronto's most architecturally important buildings for free tours. It's a great way to check out some very exciting locations in the city that aren't otherwise open to the public. I'm most excited about seeing the newly-restored Carlu (which is supposed to be one of the world's best examples of Art Moderne architecture) because it was closed for thirty years and reopened just a few weeks ago after two years of work. It's "round room" would be perfect for the penthouse location in Bear Town but the daily rental fee listed on their website is $3,500.00 so it may not be very economical. I'll have to wait and see.

In to the Matrix

2003-05-16T09:57:00.000-05:00

I have been doing a lot of work on the screenplay - a couple of hours a day usually - this week, rearranging the order of scenes, sprucing up some of the dialogue and trying to write the few scenes that still have not been fully written. I'm hoping to be done the first draft by late May/early June.

I managed to get my hands on a copy of this month's Creative Screenwriting Magazine which had a great article about the Wachowski Brothers' development process for the Matrix screenplay. I also found out the mysterious Brothers Wachowski also wrote the clunker Antonio Banderas/Robert DeNiro pic Assassins , which is important only because it proves that nobody is perfect.

Further on the Matrix front yesterday, I went to see The Matrix Reloaded. Nothing could have really topped the original, but it was very slick, very cool and one of those movies that makes you want to make movies. The much hypd "Burly Brawl" with Keanu Reeves (Neo) fighting 100+ Huge Weavings (Agent Smith) looked very CG-ish, but overall Reloaded is definitely worth checking out on the big screen. I can't wait until The Matrix Revolutions comes out in November to see how they resolve the trilogy.

Baseball anyone?

2003-05-12T17:26:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about including a briefly shot/scene involving a baseball pitcher in Bear Town. Whatever it is it will have to be a quick "throw away" shot done against a green screen as I doubt we'll have the budget to make a set. I was bored the other day during a long subway ride so I sketched a possible logo and uniform design for the pitcher.

Sewer tunnel

2003-05-12T06:02:00.000-05:00

It was Mother's Day this past weekend. I got very little done, but I did finish this conceptual painting of the sewer tunnel(s) where several short scenes in the film will be set.

Rapid Transit

2003-05-10T09:15:00.000-05:00

One of the sequences in Bear Town I've struggled with the most has been the finale, which is mostly an action sequence set on a hijacked subway at this point. Action sequences - a mainstay of Hollywood blockbusters - are generally hideously expensive to shoot. On a low budget indie film, hideously expensive is not usually an option. Complicating matters is the fact that the sequence is set on a train which generally moves and we're using puppets, so the scale of the train has to match the size of the puppets otherwise it will just look like a bunch of puppets running around on a train. All of this adds up to some kind of astronomical cost I would be frightened to even imagine. Today I think I found an ingenious solution.

Many years ago, the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) built a monorail system in the east end of the city. Called the "RT" (or Rapid Transit) system, it was built to be a low-cost extension of the eastern end of the city's Bloor/Danforth subway line. I was working out in Scarborough (east Toronto) yesterday and took the RT. Somewhere in the middle of the ride it dawned on me - the RT is a small subway train. Because it's used by fewer commuters than the city's main subway lines the RT cars consist of two single rows of seats going up and down the side of each car and an aisle just barely wide enough for two people to stand next to each other in. The operator's cabs are also very small and cramped. Even better, the cars are designed with everything (seats, windows, etc.) much lower to the ground than a regular subway. In short, it's perfect for puppets!

Assuming we could get the co-operation of the TTC (which can usually be arranged - for a fee - through Toronto's film and television office) we could potentially spend one night shooting on board an RT train. This could either be done in the garage where the trains are stored (with blue screens in the windows so the "outside" can be added later) or we could film while the train is actually moving using a steadicam. The exterior of the train - which I had always intended to be represented by a model and shot using forced perspective - can be designed to match the interior of the RT cars. If we need a subway station I believe there is a studio in Toronto that has a standing set. The TTC also supposedly has a "hidden" station near Queen St. was built to be part of a Queen subway line that was never finished. It's supposed to be still there, primarily so they can rent it out to film productions (something else to check with Toronto's film and TV office).

Before I get too excited I'll eventually have to compare the cost of doing all this to the cost of just building a few sets, but I think the location option will be much cheaper and realistic. I hope anyway. I've always wanted to film something using Toronto's subway system so I'm very excited!

Wrestling with ideas

2003-05-08T03:57:00.000-05:00

I went in to work fairly late today and the extra available brain capacity in the morning meant that I could ponder some things that have been troubling me about Bear Town and actually do some writing for the first time in about a week. I went to the Chapters bookstore at Avenue Road in Toronto and picked up a copy of Writing the Comedy Film: Make 'em Laugh which I'd highly recommend if you're writing a comedy script. The book is fairly well laid out and (unlike a lot of film writing books I've read) has a number of writing exercises that I actually found useful. I sped through most of the book in about an hour and I'm happy to report it made me rethink several scenes in Bear Town that had been bothering me and gave me some ideas how to eliminate some of the minor characters that aren't really necessary in the story.

Today I was also thinking about a key sequence in Bear Town that involves a wrestling ring. In the current working draft of the screenplay, there are two wrestling matches seen in the film, one that's fairly short near the beginning of the film that's really just there as a backdrop for a scene and to set up a big pay-off near the end of the film. In the first match, a large steroid-popping Wrestler (not named yet) takes on a much smaller, much skinnier opponent. Since the earliest drafts of Bear Town this character has always been referred to as "The Masked Marvel." Originally I had envisioned a tacky red and gold lame costume with a Lone Ranger-style mask for him. Today it dawned on me that it might be fun to make him a Luchador.

In case you're not familiar with wrestling, a "Luchador" is a masked wrestler from Lucha Libre (Mexican Wrestling). Pro Wrestling is a revered tradition in Mexico and almost all the wrestlers wear masks. The masks are rooted in early Hispanic times, part of a cultural tradition that dates all the way back to the ancient Aztecs. The masks are meant to be both symbolic and mystical - they are supposed to reveal the personality of the wrestler. The masks are considered so important that the biggest main event matches in Lucha Libre are often "mask vs. mask" where the loser must unmask and reveal his identity so that he can publicly surrender his mask to the winner.

With all this in mind - mostly to amuse myself - I decided to design an appropriately styled mask for our "Masked Marvel." I found a few websites with some good pictures of Lucha Libre masks by searching in the pictures area of Google. I also found two web stores that sell commercial reproductions of some of the famous Mexican Wrestler masks, www.anymask.com and hollywoodwebshop.com (search under "Mexican Wrestling Masks" if you go there to look).

The popular `80s M.U.S.C.L.E. toys.

I created a number of possible mask designs (see the sketches above) but I'm leaning towards something in the style of the popular 80s M.U.S.C.L.E. rubber figure toys. For the uninitiated, (probably anyone who wasn't a pre-teen boy in the late 80s) M.U.S.C.L.E. was a very cool line of 200+ tiny pink rubber wrestling figures manufactured by Mattel. Like so many popular toys, M.U.S.C.L.E. was based on a popular Japanese TV show and comic strip about wrestlers endowed with superhuman powers called Kinnikuman. I think Mattel recently relaunched the M.U.S.C.L.E. line in North America, part of the 80s revival that seems to be going on.

Bear Town is a big town

2003-05-08T01:13:00.001-05:00

I had vowed to take the night off and not do any work. Wednesdays are usually "TV Night" at my house and I usually settle in and watch Enterprise, The West Wing, and Law & Order. Earlier today I decided to pick up a pencil and grid paper and draft a rough layout of the set for downtown Marmora in Bear Town. This is actually a very important set in the film; the calculations I made last night mean that it will likely be the film's biggest at 60'0 x 70'0 which is pretty enormous when you consider you're dealing with 2'0 tall puppet characters. It will also likely be the most detailed and expensive set to build. Unfortunately, that means if the budget is tight and a set eventually has to be cut, it'll probably have to be this one as we could save on construction costs and shoot on location somewhere in Toronto employing a lot of forced perspective tricks to conceal the fact that the buildings are way too big for the puppets.

Bear Town is a big town

2003-05-08T01:13:00.000-05:00

A Bear Town web comic?

2003-05-05T03:30:00.000-05:00

Right now it's about 1:30 a.m. The entire weekend flew by and I spent most of it at the computer, yet somehow I didn't manage to write a single word of the screenplay. So much for the two page a day screenwriting habit I was trying to develop. I do have a good excuse though, I spent most of the week getting the movie's website up and running. I had wanted the www.beartown.com URL for the site, but that was snapped up (literally) days before I first looked in to buying a domain for the film a few years ago. I put off the domain purchase forever hoping my first choice would become available, but when the Wagner Group (owners of beartown.com) renewed the URL for five more years I settled for the hyphenated www.bear-town.com.

I had always intended this site to be used to document and promote the production of Bear Town, but I briefly experimented with the idea of creating a "web comic" based on Bear Town using a blend of computer graphics and photography here instead. I'm not sure now how serious I really was at the time, but I felt inspired to try after reading Scott McCloud's excellent book on the future of comic books, er "sequential art", Reinventing Comics (I also highly recommend Scott's first book Understanding Comics - even if you don't give a hoot about comics it is a fascinating read). I eventually abandoned the idea once I realized the amount of work required to create the web comic would be almost as much as producing a feature film. Almost.

My creative experiment wasn't a waste of time though - much of the art I generated has been recycled for Bear Town's storyboards or conceptual art. I've archived some of the finished portion of the web comic here for posterity. If you try to download it through a dial-up connection please be patient while it loads, as it's pretty graphics-intensive webcomic.

Welcome to Bear Town

2003-05-03T12:30:00.000-05:00

Well the web site is almost done. Actually, the web site for Bear Town will never be done - not at least until I've completed the film, but www.bear-town.com is almost good enough to go live.

It's hard to believe I actually first wrote Bear Town (in the form of a TV pilot script) about ten years ago when I was sixteen. Although I like to think that the quality of my writing has vastly improved since then, the basic story has never really changed - it's always been about "three bears, one gangster and a couple of dozen cockroaches" (kinda catchy, ain't it?).

I've made pretty good progress on the development of the film so far. I've been working on it in bits and pieces for three years, but started working on it seriously about a month ago. I've produced a lot of conceptual artwork and most of the film's characters have been now designed, even most of the background ones. Some prototypes of puppets have also been built, but nothing that's ready to be used on screen. Once I've got the web site up and running I'll be refocusing my efforts on finishing the screenplay - it's more or less complete, but many scenes are only vaguely described in a paragraph or two and need to be fully fleshed out with dialogue. I estimate I've got another 20 - 30 pages to write.

I've also been borrowing films from the library to reference for some of Bear Town's action sequences and last week I finished writing Side Street Stick-Up a short film I may shoot over the summer as a "teaser". I hope to use Side Street Stick-Up to help sell the film to potential investors and/or funding agencies and with that in mind I deliberately structured it to demonstrate how all of the tricky elements of Bear Town (puppets, computer animation, compositing, etc.) can be dealt with on a low budget. I also haven't actually directed something in several years so my demo reel is a little thin and this will let me get back in to the filmmaking swing of things, provide me with a "calling card" and prove that this (feature) film can actually be made.

But first I have to get back to work and finish this web site....