It is Sunday night what?
Jan. 21st, 2007 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reymonkeyIf I'm slow to reply or... you know... exist online these days, it is because I have been devoured by either work or puppetry practice. OMFG puppetry practice is devouring. This is in part because of Heidi, who I need to meet up with for practice, having the whole six-week-old baby thing going on, along with the six year old. Both baby (Iris Tegwyn or Teggy for short), and midget (Thea), are about as good and patient as you can expect chiddlers of those respective ages to be. It's still a struggle for Heidi to get out the door and then get full sentences or an hour straight of practice without interruptions. I don't really mind because I remember the way the puppet show goes pretty well, so I can work mostly on my own, but there's technical stuff I've needed help working out. Like the most important scene in the whole show, where Fisi the hyena plants the baobab tree upside down.
That's what happens on the shadow screen. Fisi digs a hole, pushes the tree over, and dumps it into the hole upside down. What happens on my end is I do this thing where both tree and hyena puppet flip around on their respective little rods while I switch hands and make them land in a way that has to be right the first time without leaving any dead time onscreen.
I am already having dreams about flipping shadow puppets on little flippy rods. Fisi would really like to end ass-first on the screen and I haven't quite got the wrist action or whatever down. This is Fisi the hyena, temporarily behaving himself.
I'm also more thrilled than I can possibly express to be doing this. When I designed the shadow puppets, I dreamed of and longed to get to actually work them and go on tour and stuff, and having the chance just handed to me is amazing. I'm also worried about going off to do this and leaving the pretty girl at home, but it's only two days a week, and I might get out of some of the overnight stays. I will still probably get very little sleep for a couple months, but... yeah.
I'm a puppeteer. I'm going to get paid to play with shadow puppets.
A couple more photos, because I designed these and I'm operating them. If they look skewed it's because I was taking the photos myself, while operating them. This is an act that required about four hands or propping the rods against my scarf and hoping they stuck long enough for the flash to go off. Heidi had her arms full of baby.
Giraffe with his head too big because of the angle, recieving an acacia tree:
Elephant doing a magical hinged flippy thing that operates on sheer luck, recieving the yellowwood tree:
These shots are aimed at the projector itself, so they were actually upside down on the camera, taken from my working perspective. These are also parts of the show where everything is grey. There is a later section where color comes into the world, which is achieved with gels held under the lights and a lot of color transparencies as part of the shadow puppets. There's a scene for the song, where I stretch out sliding a tray of progressively lighter blue gels, and then red and yellow, across the screen for the first verse. The second verse involves a slow reveal of animals cut away from the hillside, and looks roughly like this when projected onto a crappy white brick wall:
The real thing is onto a proper shadowscreen, but my rehearsals are a little more low tech since said shadow screen is part of a huge tent shaped like a baobab tree.
So this is what eats up my days off. I've also had an annoying head cold for almost a week and that's dragging me down, plus this random pain in my right arm that requires both painkillers and sleeping pills at night. I'm pretty sure it's a pinched nerve. I'm not sleeping real well so even when it's just regular work for the day, I don't usually feel like doing much by the time I get home in the evening.
In other news, I took the girl to work with me today because she took a class, and got a panicked call from the boss' daughter after I'd been there about a half hour, because it was snowing. The panic was unwarranted, because both class teacher and my coworker showed up on time, and the snow turned to rain. We thought it was just rain, until I went to leave work, and had to spend twenty minutes scraping ice off the car. Urgh. With my aching arm. We went straight to her parents' house for dinner even though we were early, mostly because we were hoping they'd have a better car scraper because mine almost broke. Had to scrape it a second time when we left there but her dad gave us a nice metal one and helped. It's supposed to be 51 tomorrow so hopefully I won't have a repeat of that right away.
I think that does it for my ability to sit at the computer and be coherent today.
Oh yeah! I have new boots! Ones where you can't see my socks through the sole. Just got them last night.
WTF of the day: My boots are men's boots, and the style is 'Bruisers'. They were in the mens section along with other tough guy styles 'Black Bolo', 'SWAT', and 'Kate'. Yeah, that's right, Kate. They're very manly.
That's what happens on the shadow screen. Fisi digs a hole, pushes the tree over, and dumps it into the hole upside down. What happens on my end is I do this thing where both tree and hyena puppet flip around on their respective little rods while I switch hands and make them land in a way that has to be right the first time without leaving any dead time onscreen.
I am already having dreams about flipping shadow puppets on little flippy rods. Fisi would really like to end ass-first on the screen and I haven't quite got the wrist action or whatever down. This is Fisi the hyena, temporarily behaving himself.
I'm also more thrilled than I can possibly express to be doing this. When I designed the shadow puppets, I dreamed of and longed to get to actually work them and go on tour and stuff, and having the chance just handed to me is amazing. I'm also worried about going off to do this and leaving the pretty girl at home, but it's only two days a week, and I might get out of some of the overnight stays. I will still probably get very little sleep for a couple months, but... yeah.
I'm a puppeteer. I'm going to get paid to play with shadow puppets.
A couple more photos, because I designed these and I'm operating them. If they look skewed it's because I was taking the photos myself, while operating them. This is an act that required about four hands or propping the rods against my scarf and hoping they stuck long enough for the flash to go off. Heidi had her arms full of baby.
Giraffe with his head too big because of the angle, recieving an acacia tree:
Elephant doing a magical hinged flippy thing that operates on sheer luck, recieving the yellowwood tree:
These shots are aimed at the projector itself, so they were actually upside down on the camera, taken from my working perspective. These are also parts of the show where everything is grey. There is a later section where color comes into the world, which is achieved with gels held under the lights and a lot of color transparencies as part of the shadow puppets. There's a scene for the song, where I stretch out sliding a tray of progressively lighter blue gels, and then red and yellow, across the screen for the first verse. The second verse involves a slow reveal of animals cut away from the hillside, and looks roughly like this when projected onto a crappy white brick wall:
The real thing is onto a proper shadowscreen, but my rehearsals are a little more low tech since said shadow screen is part of a huge tent shaped like a baobab tree.
So this is what eats up my days off. I've also had an annoying head cold for almost a week and that's dragging me down, plus this random pain in my right arm that requires both painkillers and sleeping pills at night. I'm pretty sure it's a pinched nerve. I'm not sleeping real well so even when it's just regular work for the day, I don't usually feel like doing much by the time I get home in the evening.
In other news, I took the girl to work with me today because she took a class, and got a panicked call from the boss' daughter after I'd been there about a half hour, because it was snowing. The panic was unwarranted, because both class teacher and my coworker showed up on time, and the snow turned to rain. We thought it was just rain, until I went to leave work, and had to spend twenty minutes scraping ice off the car. Urgh. With my aching arm. We went straight to her parents' house for dinner even though we were early, mostly because we were hoping they'd have a better car scraper because mine almost broke. Had to scrape it a second time when we left there but her dad gave us a nice metal one and helped. It's supposed to be 51 tomorrow so hopefully I won't have a repeat of that right away.
I think that does it for my ability to sit at the computer and be coherent today.
Oh yeah! I have new boots! Ones where you can't see my socks through the sole. Just got them last night.
WTF of the day: My boots are men's boots, and the style is 'Bruisers'. They were in the mens section along with other tough guy styles 'Black Bolo', 'SWAT', and 'Kate'. Yeah, that's right, Kate. They're very manly.
