Set #1: The Tower Interior!

We are finished with set #1! We are only...two days behind on our most recent schedule so far. 

Homework for Friday 2/18

On Sunday before we left, Ha, Jonathan, Kirsten and I decided on 2:30 at Cabell for our Friday meeting, where we would begin felting our puppets and discuss the Design and TV/Video/Animation episodes (alternatively, we could begin actually storyboarding the literature episode?). (Allie does that time work for you?)

SO! To accomplish this, our group homework is:

- Decide on the colors your puppet will require and what he/she will wear. We thought it would be pretty excellent to dress the same as our puppets, so pick clothes that you own and that can be easily simplified into puppet form (We will probs be making tiny clothes for them.)
---Kirsten - bring your huge box of barbie doll clothes plz!
WE WILL NEED TO HAVE THIS INFO TOGETHER BEFORE FRIDAY. Since we need to order the roving before Friday, we need to know what colors to order. Also, if we need to arrange a roving shopping trip, it will probably need to be either before Friday or on Friday morning before the meeting.


- Do some background research on Design and or TV/Video/Animation (look over old blog posts to refresh your memory about what we've already worked out) so that we can start throwing around world ideas and main messages.


Other notes from the Sunday meeting:
- The puppets will probably have no wire frame - they will be solid felt, since they are not big enough to merit hollow interiors to save materials.
- We'll probably use the stick-and-wire method of controlling the puppets from below, but that needs more work. For now, we'll work on making the puppet bodies so that our control experiments will be more informative.
- The puppets will be about Barbie height, but normal human proportions, not stick-bug proportions.
- Our self-puppets' defining features will be something like:
          -Allie: long blonde hair, blue eyes
          -Emily: blue eyes, brown hair in little buns
          -Ha: asian, long dark brown hair
          -Kirsten: long dark brown hair, side part, brown eyes
          -Jonathan: beard, glasses, short hair.
Of course we'll do what we can to make them look as much like us as possible, but if they all come out looking like this, at least we will know who is who. (Although this is our goal, of course)

Puppet Materials?

We need to decide what to make our first puppets out of. Ideally they will be a puppet-building practice exercise for our real main-character puppets, so we should make them out of whatever we plan on making Lucy and Oscar out of. 

consider: http://www.axtell.com/manip.html

Jonathan, Kirsten, and I were thinking about the pros and cons of felt vs. wire frame with paper mache, and hand puppets vs. stick puppets. 

Felt: we don't know a lot about it, but it seems like a cool material, and could end up being really nice looking and sturdy. Where do we get the wool? How hard is it to do? Could we have easily moveable joints?

Wire frame + paper mache: Jonathan made a wire-frame prototype for Don Quixote that has really well-functioning joints and looks good. The paper mache would be the questionable part regarding appearance, and possibly durability/good motion.

Hand Puppets: Easily moveable mouth, but that would use up one whole hand, and would also possibly make the puppets really big. If we used just one finger to move the bottom jaw, the size issue might be remedied. Do we need a moveable mouth?

Stick Puppets: No moveable mouth, but we could probs move two arms instead of one arm and a mouth. 

We would like to start building our self-puppets on Friday at Kirsten's dad's office at 10:00am (there's a Ben Franklin very nearby, so we could tromp over and make our first materials purchase there), so spare a couple thoughts for the material and design questions here before Friday.

Paintings as Backgrounds

We haven't discussed the technical aspect of scenery building very much, but these photoshopped paintings are exactly what I had in mind.

We should

-find high resolution scans of paintings (which we'll have to do no matter what)

-decide if we want to

-print the paintings out and arrange them in mock 3d for our puppets to explore

-figure out how to do this in photoshop or and use a green (blue?) screen to place the puppets into the scene or

-do something else?

-decide when to tour the van gogh wing of imagination world. wow.

The slideshow continues here>> http://www.artcyclopedia.com/hot/tilt-shift-van-gogh.htm

How did everyone else see the paintings represented?