Open Letter to Ted Rogers
This will only seem terribly interesting to Canadians, probably, but this is my response to Rogers’ recently announced, and fairly ridiculous, pricing for the new iPhone:
Why I’m Proud to be a Canadian.
Am I proud to be a Canadian? You bet. And since it’s Canada day, I thought I’d let puppet Brian detail some of the reasons why…
Photo Reference
I’m trying out the beta of a neat service called Evernote, one of the features of which being the ability to record all sorts of scraps of info, be it text, audio, or imagery, and to post it in a public scrapbook. So I’m going to be saving photos of things I might be wanting to incorporate into later puppet designs, things that are visually neat, and the like, and I thought I’d share it with you. If you’re interested in seeing what piques my interest as it does, you can check out the public feed here:
Pollywog in a Bog.
Here’s another video link, but this one ISN’T the Muppets. It’s a music video for the Barenaked Ladies. This video is for “Pollywog in a Bog,” from their recently released children’s album. A friend of mine is one of the puppeteers on the project, and it’s very well done all around. Very fun stuff.
Happy Independence Day, Apparently.
At the risk of turning this into a blog where I link solely to Muppet videos, I just came across this pretty funny bit for America’s Independence Day, which the commercials tell me is on July 4th. It’s a pretty good little bit, and made me laugh out loud. You should watch:
Lime in the Coconut
Watching this clip from the Muppet Show today, I’m in awe of the creative and technical aspects of it (it’s such a complicated production, and it looks so seamless!), but when I was a kid, and saw this on television, it scared the hell out of me:
Speaking as a puppeteer, I love the fact that the bed spins. And when Kermit hides under the covers? It’s done so naturally, but, man alive, that must’ve been an awkward move for Henson.
Building a Better Bono
The Bono puppet is done! I think he turned out really well, and is one of our better puppets so far. This is what he looks like:
And this is how he was built:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/inelegant/sets/72157605759679230/
Building Bono
For reasons I can’t yet get into, we’re working on a Bono puppet. We’re just about at the “putting the skin on the foam skeleton” phase, and it’s already looking cool, and the likeness is there. Makes a person feel good.
This is the design. Click on it to see the photos of the build process in Flickr:
The Art of Wall-E.
Not to turn this blog into a lesser rehash of drawn.ca, but they were kind of enough to point to the very swanky-looking art book for the upcoming Pixar movie Wall-E. The Art of Wall-E has a ton of production sketches, concept art, and the like. I consider this relevant to Hoggworks because it’s all about character design, and that’s very important when you’re creating any kind of character, from a physical item such as a figure, sculpture, or a puppet, to cartoons, CG characters, or anything else.
The book looks really nice, and in my admittedly limited experience reading “Art of” books (something I should rectify) the concept designs frequently posess an energy that the final products seem to lack (I’m looking at you, Star Wars).
