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.
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.
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.
Well, isn't it always the way...just as I was planning to get things back on track with Bear Town life got in the way I got sidetracked by something else. Only this time it was something very, very cool - I started working with a bunch of other puppeteers and puppet builders in Toronto and I've done more puppetry work in the past nine months than I had in previous two and a half years. The video above is of our first public performance back in February.
We've been focused on doing bunraku-style puppetry work which has got me thinking about a totally different approach to the puppetry in Bear Town. I'm not really sure when I'll be back at Bear Town full-tilt, but the gears in my head are turning.
Wok With Marshall was the first episode of The Marshall and Buck Show, which was - to my knowledge anyway - the internet's first puppet web series. The series was built around two characters I originally created for my Bear Town project, Marshall and Buck. Each episode featured Marshall and Buck engaging in some kind of activity like cooking, acting, or putting on a magic show that would go horribly awry. Four episodes of the show were sporadically produced between 1997 and 2000, starting with Wok With Marshall which was shot in 1997, but didn't premiere online until March 10, 2000.
Unfortunately, because I don't own any of the master tapes from the series it hasn't been available online for a long time, but I did recently find a high quality dub of Wok With Marshall so I thought I would share it here. It's a little rough, but keep in mind that we did make it over ten years ago.
The puppeteers in the video are the brilliant Shawn Hazelton (Marshall), myself (Buck) and Kim Mahony and Pauline Antonopoulos, who performed the Happy Meal puppets and Betsy, Marshall and Buck's cow. The video was directed by Brenda Tan, who's also credited as the writer although I seem to remember that half of this was ad-libbed on set.
I'm embarrassed to admit this, but it was only this past week that I finally saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time. This is one of the funniest (and most famous) scenes in the movie; Indy has survived a mad chase/fight through the casbah only to be confronted by a big guy with an even bigger sword and some flashy skills. Exhausted and in no mood to fight, Indy pulls out his gun and shoots the sword-wielding bad guy dead.
Legend has it that this famous scene came about because Harrison Ford had a developed a terrible case of dysentery filming the movie in Tunisia. As scripted, the fight scene between Indy and the swordsman would have required three days to shoot, so Ford - presumably motivated by a desire to spend less time suffering in the heat and more time on the toilet - suggested "why don't I just shoot the guy?".
As the cliche says, necessity is the mother of invention.
This simple gag probably plays much better than whatever fight scene had been originally scripted and is a good example how simpler is almost always better. I was reminded of the "K.I.S.S." principle today while working on the Bear Town script on the way home from my office. The script was originally written as an independent feature and I have been carving it up in to small chunks that will work as 3-5 minute webisodes.
There are sections of the script I really don't like; the dialogue is clunky and the story doesn't feel like it flows naturally. I was really struggling to figure out how to make a couple scenes work tonight when it suddenly occurred to me that I could just cut them. That in turn inspired me to reorder a couple other scenes and eliminate a few more. In a span of fifteen minutes on the bus I probably cut thirty pages of script down to ten. Everything is much shorter, simpler and (most importantly) funnier.
