We’re Going to Canada!

Posted on April 8, 2015 by ccbooks

Wit’s End Puppets is taking to the road! Or the plane, as a matter of fact. We have been invited by the good folks at the University of Manitoba’s Mauro Center for Peace and Justice to perform Saudade at the Winnipeg International Storytelling Festival in May.

This is the first time we have been able to take a larger show to an out-of-town event, so we are extremely excited! Since we wrapped up our INTERSECTIONS run, we have been making some changes to the show, adding puppets, polishing scenes and revising sounds to better achieve the effects and images in our minds. We received lots of excellent feedback from our audiences at the Atlas, and have been considering how best to incorporate audience suggestions. The show has a new ending, several interludes that break up the stories of our three main characters and we are working towards creating recorded monologues to begin and end the show that will feature the voices of many of the people whose stories were captured and shared in the script. Here are a few pictures of the progress we’ve made so far:

Amy is carefully placing the tiny paper birds between these two silhouettes.

A new scene added at the end of show.

The ending images were all cut in one long big piece this time.

We have to carefully cut off the bottom edge to make sure everything matches.

March Grab Bag

Posted on March 31, 2015 by ccbooks

A round up of articles, links and videos that we shared on Twitter this month.

See item #5.

1. We wish we could head out to LA this spring for the Skirball Puppet Festival. It sounds like a blast!

2. Continuing with the theme of cool puppet events that we’ll have to miss, this production of The Little Prince in NYC also looks amazing.

3. Closer to home, it’s your last week to catch Pointless Theatre Company’s production of Dr. Caligari, with puppets designed and constructed by our very own Genna Davidson.

4. We were also excited to get to see The Winter’s Tale, produced by Half-Mad Theatre here in DC, with a puppet Mamilius.

5. This article about US puppeteer Paul Mesner was a lovely and thought-provoking read. Take a look!

SAUDADE Process Video

Posted on March 25, 2015 by ccbooks

This video contains some of the various pieces of the process it took to create Saudade: building shadow puppets, experimenting with movement on the various screens and finally the moving crankie and puppets in the finished piece. We hope you enjoy it!

Building a Shadow Puppet Joint

Posted on March 19, 2015 by ccbooks

We occasionally get questions about how we create our shadow puppets for shows like Saudade, so here is a short video with the steps for making a joint out of fishing line. Genna Davidson explains the process, using a lighter, awl and scissors. Hopefully this will be useful to those of you making puppets at home!

The Long Saudade Crankie Saga

Posted on March 6, 2015 by ccbooks

By far the most time-consuming part of building Saudade was the crankie which forms the bulk of the show. Additional images appear on the side screens, but most of the action happens on this very long roll of Tyvek in front of an LED light. It took nearly two months to design and cut out all the scenes on the crankie, and a week to put it all together. Here are photos from the process.

Spacing the images is important and takes time.

Amy and Genna work together to glue down an image.

Each image gets sprayed with glue carefully. Sometimes it’s hard to keep different parts from sticking to each other before it’s glued down.

The roll of Tyvek is longer than our box so we had to carefully measure and cut about six inches off the bottom of the entire roll.

One of the many intricate images on the crankie.

Delicate images wait on newspaper so they don’t get crushed before being added to the crankie. We took over most of the living room eventually.

Most of the crankie images are cut from black Tyvek, but these included some silver tissue paper as well.

Amy makes an adjustment before gluing down the final image.

This is the final roll–nearly 3 inches thick!

Our first rehearsal with the finished roll, testing the light and the box.

Here’s what an image looks like from the reverse side…

And here it is in light! Hope you enjoyed this tour of the building process!

February Grab Bag

Posted on March 4, 2015 by ccbooks

A roundup of links, articles and generally cool stuff we highlighted on Twitter in February.

See item #4

1. Here’s a super cool stop-motion video with cardboard puppets.

2. This exhibit at the Hirshhorn museum includes a piece involving light and cast shadows.

3. The official trailer for Song of the Sea, an animated film based on the selkie legend which we incorporated into Malevolent Creatures.

4. The picture book The Rabbits, written by John Marsden and illustrated by our favorite Shuan Tan has been turned into an opera.

5. This show came to the Artisphere in Arlington and we were sad to miss it! Hopefully we can see this company another time.

A Huge Thank You

Posted on February 25, 2015 by ccbooks

A first glimpse of our crankie!

Saudade would not have been created without the help and support of many, many people who agreed to be interviewed about their experiences as immigrants to the DC area. Some of these people also helped us record sound clips for the show; others contributed their memories, stories of challenges they have faced and of course, moments of saudade. For reasons of privacy, we are only identifying people by their first names, but we want to acknowledge everyone and say a huge thank you for your help!

Sonia – Stephanie – Eiko – Sebastian – Ruth – Santiago – Ana – Juliana – Ottoniel – Eddy – Victor – Juan – Seare – Yolanda – Yanira – Oscar – Anamaria – Fernando – Nurya – Alexei – Genevieve – Grimaneza – Cintia – Rosario – Miguel – Svetlana – Nurbiya – Benta – Souad – Natalia – Hoummad – Noelya – Marisabel – Julio – Zohar – Emi – Diego – Johanna – Andrea – Doyoung – Fabiola – Artemis – Savana – Erick – Emma – Victoria – Omar – Arie – Susana – Medina – Amanda – Mehdi – Rashad – Sandra – Birol

Video: Building Saudade

Posted on February 19, 2015 by ccbooks

The puppets for Saudade are designed by Katherine Fahey, a Baltimore-based artist and puppeteer. They are cut from poster board and pieces are connected with fishing line joints and operated with either wooden or metal rods. In this short video, I’m creating a puppet of a teacher character. It’s a process that takes a lot of time, patience and precision with an X-acto knife.

SAUDADE Audio Clip

Posted on February 17, 2015 by ccbooks

Saudade was based on a series of interviews with immigrants to the DC area from all over the world. Among other questions, I asked everyone about moments when they felt ‘saudade’–the feeling of longing for a place or person you once had that is now gone. Here is a very short audio clip in Portuguese of one of the interviewees from Brazil talking about times when she feels saudade.

Building SAUDADE #3

Posted on February 16, 2015 by ccbooks

Building puppets is usually a painstaking process and even more so with shadow puppetry. The tiniest details make a huge difference and (at least for me) there is a lot of agonizing over whether or not a silhouette will make sense to the audience. For Saudade, much of the action happens on a crankie, a long roll of paper with black silhouettes of settings and characters. Creating the silhouettes for this involves several steps:

1. Set up this opaque projector so I can play with the size of the image. The taped out square is the size of the screen.

2. Project the image and fit it to the screen. This only works when it’s dark out, meaning I do a lot of this very late at night, after rehearsal.

3. Trace the image in white pencil onto black tyvek, which is very thin but strong paper that won’t tear easily. Important when you have so many tiny little details!

4. Cut out the image! Now it’s ready to go onto the background roll and eventually into the crankie.