Simple simple simple

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.etoday.ru%2F2010%2F03%2Fozhivshie-predmeti-terri-borde.php&h=1064f

Personifying simple objects works here (i think) by using simple backgrounds/props with clearly communicated situations. The short focus and brights colors makes it seem totally self-contained (not overly simple/unfinished).

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)

Roving for Roving

Okay, so from what I can see here is the lay of the land re: felting wool.

The Fiber Warehouse (aka mystery phone number guy):
Undyed is 13.50/lb, Dyed is 15.70/lb
He doesn't ship till Friday, so he said we'd probably get it by Monday or Tuesday.
POTENTIAL PROBLEM: do we have to buy 1lb at a time? Can we buy less than a lb. of any one color?  A pound is a LOT, right?

Harrisville Designs (aka the other place VCU orders from)
$16/ half lb. bag.
Would probably ship 3-5 days after we order, plus delivery time.

Holly Spring Homespun - I called the Yarn Lounge in Carytown and they said the closest place they knew of to buy roving is this place. It's about a 45 minute drive from here.
They don't have a wide selection, but their site lists a pack of rainbow colors (see link) for $24. I THINK it's 6 oz. total, and the lady kept going on about how it was sooo much more than we needed, but she doesn't really know what we're doing.... anyway, it's an option we could get immediately and use as a stopgap while we waited for another order to ship, since time is of the essence.

We also have the option of buying little starter bags from places like Ben Franklin or Kmart I think - they sell little assortment packs of 1.76 oz. with 8 colors for something like $11, or individual color .22 oz. packets for $3/ea. Couldn't confirm the availability at Kmart but Ben Franklin said they have it. Hobby Lobby out in Short Pump sells .25 oz packets of 2 colors for $2.


The Fiber Warehouse is by far the cheapest, and it's actually the fastest shipper compared VCU's other place. The places we can drive to seem to be marked way up in price and we'd have to drive quite a little bit. I suggest we order from the Fiber Warehouse asap, and in the meantime get some of the little packs to tide us over and get us started working.

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.

Puppet Thoughts

Alexander Calder's Circus

Extremely simple, effective figures/animals made from wire, wood, and fabric (?)