PuppetVision Blog

Lou Romano shares some of his beautiful conceptual art from Pixar's Up on his blog (image c Disney/Pixar).

Up was the number one movie at the box office this weekend, which is pretty unsurprising since many critics are calling it Pixar's best movie yet and because, well, it's a Pixar movie. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm looking forward to checking it out this week because everyone seems to be raving about it. If you want to see some absolutely beautiful conceptual art from the film, head over to the blog of Lou Romano who has put together a huge post featuring his design and production work from Up.

Pixar's next film is Toy Story 3, which is slated for release next year. A teaser trailer has just been released and it's predictably perfect (I imagine it's probably playing in theatres in front of Up).

Sita Sings The Blues is an animated feature by Nina Paley licensed under Creative Commons.

Happy Memorial Day to all my American friends! (Here in Canada, it's just another Monday...)

Whether you have the day off today or not, find sometime soon to watch Sita Sings the Blues. It's a feature length animated 2D film that was written, directed, produced and animated entirely by Nina Paley on a single computer in her apartment(!). As if that wasn't cool enough, she's decided to release the film under Creative Commons for free and is trying to make money on the film through voluntary payments, ancillary products, sponsorships, public screenings, and limited DVD sales. According to some reports, her somewhat unorthodox distribution strategy has already made her money than a conventional film distribution contract would have.

You can download Sita Sings The Blues for free and learn more about the film at www.sitasingstheblues.com. If you enjoy watching the film, please show your appreciation and consider giving Nina a small donation for all her great work.

Black/White is a stark, monochromatic video that blends shadow puppets and animation.

To promote their spring and summer collections this year, Gap commissioned five original songs based on a specific color and a corresponding video for each. My favourite of these is Black / White, which features a song by Danish post-punk duo The Raveonettes and a stunning blend of filmed shadow puppets and computer animation (to really appreciate it you really have to watch it multiple times). The video was directed by Chris Do of BL:IND; you can check out lots of "making of" goodies from the project here.

Link via Motiongrapher via Brian.

Stop motion animator Jamie Caliri creates distinctive, beautifully crafted stop motion animation for film and television.

In my current "day job" I design opening credits and title sequences. When I'm searching for inspiration I often watch the work of one of my favourite animators, Jamie Caliri. His amazing credits include the title sequences of Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (see previous post) and The United States of Tara. He's also helped pioneer the development of Dragon Stop Motion, a stop motion animation software package I'm dying to try (a free 10 trial version of Dragon is available to download).

The video for Minilogue's Animals blends live action with the unique animation of Kristofer Ström.

I really love this video for Minilogue's Animals. It's a fantastic fusion of animation and live action directed by Swedish animator Kristofer Ström, who first gained a lot of attention on YouTube for his white board animation. Visit Kristofer's Vimeo page to see more of his great work.

Via Smashing Magazine.

Coraline maybe just be the best 3D film ever made.

It's the long Family Day weekend in most of Canada (and President's Day for my American friends). If you're still looking for something to do with your family I highly recommend going to see Coraline, preferably in 3D if you can. Coraline has been a source of inspiration here a couple of times before (see previous posts here and here) and much has already been written in the blogosphere about how wonderful it is.

Personally, what I really like best about it is that it's the first movie written by Neil Gaiman that actually feels like a Neil Gaiman movie. I've been really fascinated by Coraline's filmmaking process too. The AV Club has a great interview with Coraline's brilliant director Henry Selick. There is a also a lot of the intricate, handcrafted work from the film popping up online. Check out the work of miniature knitter Althea Crome, who made Coraline's ridiculously tiny clothes and sculptor Damon Bard, who has pictures of the maquettes he made for the film on his web site www.bardsculpturestudio.com.

Update: Over at Cartoon Brew Amid was kind enough to put together a playlist of videos shot at Coraline production artists panel at Gallery Nucleus last week in L.A.

23/2/09 Update: Drawn has put up a great post containing links to the work of several more fantastic artists who contributed to Coraline.

Watch 50 incredible stop motion videos, compiled by the good folks at Smashing Magazine.

Smashing Magazine has put together a fantastic list of 50 incredible stop motion videos. My favourites from the list include Human Tetris, Sia - Breathe Me and the previously-blogged Process Enacted. I also thought that the Super Mario Bros. 3 Lego animation was very cool, but it's not actually stop motion (the video's description explains how it was faked).

Canadian animator Michel Gagné is adapting his Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets as a video game (image ©2008 Shadow Planet Productions LLC).

I think I first mentioned Michel Gagné's Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets way back in 2005. They were originally a series of shadow puppet-inspired interstitials originally created for Nickelodeon, but now Michel and top-notch crew of developers are hard at work on a video game adaptation called Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet! You can watch the Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet trailer and read more about it on Michel Gagné's web site.

Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is tentatively scheduled for release in mid-2009.

Wall-E director Andrew Stanton recently had an in-depth chat with Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

Creative Screenwriting Magazine recently posted an exclusive audio interview with the director of Wall-E, Pixar's Andrew Stanton that makes for a great listen. The Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcast has a bunch more of these that are definitely worth checking out.

Via the Disney Blog.

Hand made, stop-motion-animated paper puppets are used in the closing credits of Madagascar: Escape To Africa.

If you've watched many recent animated films you may noticed the opening and closing credit sequences, which seem to be getting more and more creative every year. I haven't seen Madagascar: Escape To Africa, but I love the film's closing credits, available as a high-res download.

The animation was designed and animated by the talented Jamie Caliri, who is one of my favorite animators. The fantastic paper puppets seen in the sequence were created by Meghan Brain (check them out on her blog here and here).

Via Cartoon Brew.

Reverse Shadow Theatre is an installation created with Animata digital puppetry software.

Animata is open source real-time animation (or digital puppetry) software that is "designed to create animations, interactive background projections for concerts, theatre and dance performances". The goal of Animata is to make it really easy to create scenes with digital puppets that can be controlled via physical sensors, microphones or cameras.

Animata has already been used for a couple of interesting projects, including Animata Jazz Pub (an interesting demo that shows how the Animata software can be used to react to live audio input) and Reverse Shadow Theatre (an installation that was created with Animata, inspired by Wayang Kulit, an Indonesian form of shadow puppet theatre).

If you want to try playing around with the software yourself, the Animata software can be downloaded for free for both the Mac and PC. The source is licensed under the GPL and can also be downloaded from Google Code.

Cross-posted from Machin-X: Digital Puppetry.

British installation artist Sarah Jane Palmer created the "silhouette animation" The Incredible Mandy Mango.

The Incredible Mandy Mango is a "silhouette film animation" of a Corde lisse performance. It was created by Sarah Jane Palmer, a British artist who works in mixed media, animation, mask making and several other disciplines. She created this using stop motion animation, but the shadow puppet influence is obvious. There's no reason you couldn't do something just like this live in real-time with a little practice!

You can also check out Cromance, an earlier silhouette animation experiment that Sarah created last year.

This story sketch was drawn by legendary animator Ub Iwerks during the production of the very first Mickey Mouse cartoon.

Mark Sonntag posted these fantastic storyboard pages from Plane Crazy (the very first Mickey Mouse cartoon ever made) on his Tag Toonz blog about a week ago. They are really good, especially considering the crude nature of animation at that time. A lot of people don't know this, but storyboard is a process that was invented at the Disney studio. As Mark points out, actual storyboards weren't in use at Disney until about 1932 so these are technically just "story sketches" created by the legnedary Ub Iwerks, who helped Walt Disney create Mickey Mouse.

Spotting this was kind of timely for me because I'm currently reading Neal Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. I've read several biographies of Disney, but I think Gabler's is the definiative one. If you have an interest in Disney or animation in general and haven't read it yet, you should.

Baltimore's Annex Theater performs a "live episode" of the cult classic cartoon Space Ghost.

Check out this video of Baltimore's Annex Theater performing an episode of the cult classic cartoon Space Ghost live on stage with puppets (you can watch the original episode for reference purposes here). Just watch out for Dr. Nightmare and his army of Nightmare Creatures...

Via Urlesque.

Hi, I'm a Marvel...and he's a DC uses super heroes and found object puppetry to send up Apple's popular I'm a Mac...and I'm PC commercials.

This has got to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen on YouTube; it's been around for over a year and half, but I only discovered it this week. Hi, I'm a Marvel...and he's a DC is a long running series of parodies produced by Michael Agrusso and Brinna Li. The videos spoof the popular Get a Mac commercials using superhero characters like Batman and Spiderman that are brought to life using simple found object puppetry techniques.

Michael - who is a writer, performer and voice coach based in L.A. - was inspired to create the series in early 2007, after reading that features films based on DC Comics character The Flash and Wonder Woman had both lost their directors due to creative differences with Warner Bros. on the same day while Marvel comic book franchises like Spiderman, X-Men and Iron Man were either made millions at the box office or were currently in production. Michael saw parallels between Marvel/Macintosh and DC/PC and Hi, I'm a Marvel...and I'm a DC was born.

The earliest videos were filmed simply against a white sheet, with Michael and Brinna performing action figures in real time in front of an iMovie camera. Later videos are a little more sophisticated, sometimes utilizing stop motion animation techniques and using more sophisticated sets and story lines. My personal favourites are the ones that feature Iron Man and Batman:



The series has become so popular that it has been featured on the official Marvel web site and Michael's YouTube channel currently has over 60,000 subscribers, including the likes of Iron Man director Jon Favreau.

Special thanks to quite-possibly-the-world's-greatest-sock-monkey-maker Robin, for introducing me to these!

Voice artist/actor Christy Carlson Romano made her puppeteering debut in Avenue Q.

Here's another one of those neat puppetry/animation connections that seem to frequently pop up...Christy Carlson Romano - the voice of the popular Disney animated character Kim Possible - has been on Broadway puppeteering Kate Monster and Lucy the Slut in Avenue Q (roles originated by puppeteer Stephanie D'Abruzzo). Christy has been onstage since September 29th and her run is scheduled to continue until November 23rd.

An animator looks away as stop motion puppets are posed on the set of Coraline.

I already featured Coraline as a source of inspiration here late last year (see previous post), but I am really, really looking forward to it so I'll mention it again. It's the first feature film from Laika and the artistic stakes for the company are huge. If you want to see what the fuss is all about, the L.A. Times recently visited the set and have posted a gallery of photographs. You can also watch a clip from Coraline online and search for more Coraline sneak peeks on YouTube.

Flying Pizza Kitty is the latest web project from Ben Ross.

The multi-talented Ben Ross (see previous post) has done it again. Check out his latest über-cute creation Flying Pizza Kitty.

Legendary Japanese animator Kihachirō Kawamoto has been making stop motion films for over 50 years.

Kihachirō Kawamoto (link goes to his official site, in Japanese) is a Japanese animator, renowned internationally for his work in stop motion animation. As a boy he was inspired by the work of the acclaimed Czech stop motion filmmaker Jiří Trnka and later trained under him, as well as Japanese stop motion pioneer Tadahito Mochinaga. Many of Kawamoto's films - including his most recent, 2005's Book of the Dead - seem strongly influenced by Bunraku puppetry and Japanese Noh theatre.

You can read an interview with him here and see find some of his work on YouTube.

Artist Bob Logan scans classic Hanna-Barbera View-Master reels and features them on his blog.

Growing up I loved collecting reels for my View-Master. Some of my favourites were the recreations of classic Hanna Barberra cartoons as 3D models. Like a lot of people, artist Bob Logan must love them too because he's been running an ongoing series of scanned View-Master reels on his blog.

Along with creating my own theme park, designing a set of View-Master reels is one of my as-yet-unfilled childhood dreams.

Via Cartoon Brew.