Inside Hoggworks

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.

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:

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.

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/

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:

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).

I’m working on a design for a new puppet (for a couple, actually), with one hopefully getting made over the weekend in an atypically rush-rush kind of manner. I’m going to see how little sleep I can manage with, how quickly I can build the thing, and how little I can skimp on the quality. This puppet — which I can not yet talk about, sadly — will be for web video only, so there’s a certain leeway there, but not terribly much, as web video today can mean anything from a 320×240 video all the way up to true 720p/1080i/1080p HD video.

The reason I’m mentioning this at all right now is because this new puppet is based on an existing person. More than that, it’s based on an incredible famous and well-known person (even moreso than Stephen Colbert). As such, I’m working off an existing visual, which is to say, this person’s actual appearance. Which is to say … I’m making a caricature of him. Now, in some ways, many of the dotBoom puppets, based loosely on real people (who have largely forgiven me), were all caricatures, but that seems like a bit of a stretch, to be honest. And with the Stephen Colbert puppet, there was the attempt to make it look very much like Colbert, and despite the fact that you need to caricature because you need to pick out and exaggerate the key features so that it makes the resemblance between puppet and person completely obvious, it was and it is a very good-natured endeavor.

This new puppet, though? It’s a shot across the bow. It’s a project I’m doing with a friend of mine, and while some other people he talks about, and some other people we nearly lampooned, are people that he and I like, I have no personal feelings toward this person, and my friend somewhat actively dislikes him. There are apparently good reasons for this, but I’ve never put that much thought into it. Now, before anyone wonders or worries: no, this isn’t a simple attack piece. I’d never do this. There’s a good angle on what we’re doing, and, as with most of the stuff I do, it’s funny. It’ll be a good gag, simple as that. When it’s done I think it’ll be pretty great — my friend’s writing the script, and he’s very funny,  and I’ll be doing the puppet-building and puppetry, with the possible help of my friend Nicholas Lemon — so there’s no worry to be had about my suddenly going all-attack, and no-wit.

Back to the caricature: I spent a chunk of yesterday working on the design for this new puppet, figuring out the physical elements to highlight and accentuate, and what aspects of the puppet’s caricature they would be representative of. I think I’ve got a good design done, which will look like the person it’s supposed to, and also be exaggerated in all the right ways. If the build goes as planned (assuming nothing falls through) I should be starting on it tomorrow afternoon, and in theory I should have photos of the design and puppet progress up in the next few days.

Part of the reason I mentioned this at all, aside from a desire to update this blog more frequently, and get back to that “pulling back the curtain” kind of thing, is because I came across this very cool designer’s site (via drawn.ca), and I wanted to pass along the link. His name is Kyle T. Webster, and his work is great. He does some nice logo work, and illustration, but I mention him here because he does dynamite caricature work. You should definitely check him out.

This isn’t puppet-related, but I want to send a link along because it’s about good design. Specifically, it’s about Ralph McQuarrie, famous concept artist on the Star Wars saga. He apparently did concept sketches for Battlestar Galactica, and I just saw a link today of some paintings he did relating to the project. From the galactica.tv page about the concept art:

Next to doing concept sketches for the designs of the ships and aliens on Battlestar Galactica 1978, Ralph McQuarrie was also asked to paint 24 color images to be used on the first script of the pilot “Saga of a Star World”. This script (of which only 50 were printed) was written to convince the studios to pick up this costly project and the illustrations helped to explain and visualize the story. This gallery shows, for the first time, a complete set of those 24 color images.

Say what you will about the original Galactica — I, for example, will say it was a hideously awful show, with poor writing and poor performances across the board — McQuarrie’s a great designer. And having seen the original Galactica movie fairly recently, I have to say how impressed I am at how faithfully they recreated those painted moments on the screen; top notch work, even if there wasn’t the script to back it up.

Check out all of the concept art by going here.

(I should point out that for all its faults, if not for the original Galactica there wouldn’t be the current version, and as much as I loathe the original, I love the reimagining, and so have to give the original some credit for being a great idea, however poorly executed. And, hey, if it had been wonderfully executed, the re-imagining wouldn’t have been necessary. So, thanks for sucking, original Battlestar Galactica!)

I’ve been watching the development of Spore, the upcoming universe-sim game by legend Wil Wright, for some time now, as have many millions of others. The release is coming up pretty soon, and they’ve just released a trial version of the game’s Creature Creature. You can download it for both Mac and PC.

The trial lets you make a creature using the game’s super-easy and intuitive 3D interface, and the results you can get out of it are quite striking visually, and also very complex. It looks pretty cool.

I’ve heard a number of puppeteers talking about using the Creature Creator as a pre-viz environment, to quickly get a sense of what their puppets will look like in 3D. I suppose you could use them for that, but I’m going to be the curmudgeon and suggest that won’t catch on. Is the interface powerful? Yes. Is it easy to use? Yes. So why don’t I think it’ll work? Well, aside from the fact that you’re only creating lizard-skinned creatures, without (so far as I’ve seen) the ability to add feathers, fur, or anything else, it comes down to character: the game engine will automatically animate the creatures you design, and while it’s amazing and technologically fantastic — the programming skills to make an engine that can dynamically manipulate, with skill and accuracy, creatures with a variable number of limbs is insane –  I don’t want the game to tell me how my new creature moves. That’s the puppeteer’s jobs, and one of the most fun parts of the process of building a puppet: you put it on for the first time, and you figure out exactly how the character operates, how he moves, how he talks, how he laughs, all of that.

It might be more accurate to say that I don’t think I’ll use it for puppet pre-viz, not that most people won’t.

Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the game as puppet-design tool, I’m quite excited to play it, and I recommend everybody check it out.

You can download the Creature Creator Trial at: http://www.spore.com/trial