Sorry for the lack of recent updates. I've recently been occupied by a family emergency and updates may be few and far between over the summer as a result. If you're enrolled in the Puppet Building 101 course, it's been placed on hold until July 13th, at which point it will resume.
I have no definite future plans right now, but things will probably return to normal sometime around late August or early September. Thanks for your understanding.
Kathy Danley made a short video featuring an adorable Sock Zombie.
Remember Erin Glaser's Sock Zombies? Well, Kathy Danley went and made a short film with one of them! You can watch Sock Zombie "doing the dating thing" on YouTube.
Jay ThePal (and Kay ThePal) seem to be popping up all over social media lately.
It took me a little while to figure out what was up with Jay ThePal, a puppet character that seemed to start popping up all over every social media website that you can think of lately. I think I first saw him (along with Kay ThePal) when they gave me a shout-out on 12seconds.tv, which is sort of Twitter for video.
Jay ThePal is one of those FAO Schwartz "Whatnot" Muppet puppets and seems to be a sort of puppetry experiment that's happening all over the web (Twitter, YouTube, 12seconds, etc.). It's a little difficult to get a handle on the whole project or where it's going, but it's very interesting to watch how people are using puppetry to explore social media. Definitely something to keep an eye on.
Puppetry students at the University of Hawaii re-create The Evolution of Dance with a puppet.
I love Bunraku-style puppetry, so I really enjoyed seeing A Study of Movement (The Evolution of Dance), a final project for a puppetry class at the University of Hawaii inspired by the famous YouTube viral video.
Paul recently did a great post on his blog about Jim Henson's early commercial spots and how that could be a successful advertising model today. I think he's absolutely right; his post reminds me of one I wrote a couple years ago called Using Puppets To Pay The Bills.
The 30 second pre-roll ad is almost universally hated. The web is a new medium that we're still in early stages of exploring. The people who really "break through" and define it will be the ones who figure out new ways of telling stories and develop new (old?) ways of thinking about advertising and sponsorship.
Dan Stevers creates Christian-themed motion graphics.
Over the past month or I've been watching and enjoying Dan Stevers' Christian-themed motion graphics videos on Vimeo. Two of my favourites are The Light of the World and Life With God. Some of Dan's videos are artistic interpretations of Christian scripture, while others simply illustrate basic Christian principles.
You can see all of Dan's videos on Vimeo. His work is available to purchase from Worship House Media.
"OK" nicely combines puppetry and pop-up books.
I know at least a couple puppeteers who love to make pop-up books. This music video from an unfortunately named band seems to combine those two interests very nicely.
Via Mary Robinette Kowal.
Nike's MVPuppets campaign has been a huge hit with basketball fans.
Nike's MVPuppets campaign (see previous posts here and here) keeps rolling right along. I think the bigger a fan of the NBA you are, the more you can appreciate these. The storyline in the ads has been following along with the NBA playoffs; in one of the newest ones LeBron - who's never won an NBA championship - is stuck at home with Lil' Dez while Kobe Bryant plays in the finals.
The ads have gotten a lot of attention and really prove that clever, well-done puppetry appeals to just about everybody. Click "Read More" to see some of the latest spots:
To see all the videos in the MVPuppets series visit the Nike Basketball video page.
Transylvania TV is preparing it's second season.
Production on Transylvania TV (see previous post) seems to be humming along nicely. The show is holding auditions for new puppeteers and also running a puppet design competition called the "Lose Your Intellectual Property Contest" (hey, at least they're honest about it!).
Season two of Transylvania TV debuts online July 4th.
Is NBC's 30 Rock based on The Muppet Show?
Brian Lynch - screenwriter of the unproduced and literally-titled The Next Muppet Movie - has written a hilarious post on his blog alleging that the NBC comedy 30 Rock is a rip off of The Muppet Show. Although he's writing with his tongue firmly in his cheek, the similarities are actually kind of striking. I mean, I knew there were some connections between the Muppets and 30 Rock, but after reading this I'll never be able to look at Tracey Morgan with a straight face again.
Red is the new puppet mascot of Virgin One.
British broadcaster Virgin One has a brand new mascot and he's a puppet. His name is Red and he's performed by Brian Herring and was built by Paul Jomain, who also built the PG Tips monkey.
Red was created as part of complete rebranding of Virgin One that begins on air tonight at 9 p.m. in the UK. There's a promo available on YouTube and eagle-eyed PuppetVision readers will spot several puppets by the Gluvets (see previous post) and Darryl Worbey Studios in the video. The cast puppeteers who worked on this included Mak Wilson, Brian Herring, Phil Fletcher and Simon Buckley.
Update: I've revised the post to correct some mistakes I made about who did what on this. Special thanks to James for setting me straight!
You may not know this about me, but I went to business school.
Actually, I went to a special one-year program here in Toronto that incubates small businesses and trains them in entrepreneurship. While I was there, we frequently had business owners come in to do guest lectures. One of the lecturers was the owner of a rapidly expanding bakery who told us a story that I've thought about a lot lately.
The story was about the first few years of his business and how he barely made a living running a small shop selling his baked goods. One day, finally fed up with not having any money and with a baby on the way, he decided something had to change. He started trying new things, altered his business model and starting selling his products wholesale to supermarkets and other stores. This worked really well because the supermarkets and stores could sell a lot more of his products to the public than he ever could. As an additional bonus, because the stores and supermarkets now took care of most of the sales work he was able to focus on his real passion, making food.
Not long after he made the change he was out with his wife one night and they stopped at a supermarket to pick something up. He saw people buying his products and realized that he was making money right then and there even though he was out on a date with his wife!
In business there are two types of income - linear income and passive income. Most people make a linear income. If you have a job and work X number of hours to get paid X number of dollars or if you make something (like a puppet) and then sell it, you make a linear income. There's nothing wrong with a linear income per se, but the difficulty with it is that in order to make more money you usually have to do more work. At a certain point you just can't work any more hours so there's a pretty firm ceiling on how much money you can earn from a linear income source.
By comparison, a passive income is money that you make with little to no effort. Advertising is a good example of a passive income source; it takes about the same amount of work to write a blog read by one million visitors as it does to write one read by ten people, but you can make a lot more money advertising to one million readers than ten. Other good examples of passive income would be selling merchandise through Cafepress or selling a puppet pattern that people can download from your online store. A passive income scales much better than a linear one does, so in theory you can make more and more money without having to do more and more work.
Selling baked goods wholesale probably isn't a textbook example of a passive income source, but the underlying lesson of the bakery story - maximizing profit while minimizing effort - is what passive income is all about. It's also something that I think all artists need to understand. After all, if you look at puppetry or just entertainment in general, the most successful companies all rely on passive income streams like licensing and advertising to make most of their profits.
I know his might seem really simple and an obvious thing to point out, but if it's common sense then it's not so common. Think about how many people you know who are struggling and make a linear income? Are you? Earning any kind of income - passive or linear - takes hard work, but the more I think about it, the more having a passive income seems like a better, smarter way to work.
Take a look behind the scenes of Abba's The Last Video.
This is a follow-up to the post about Abba's The Last Video; it's a making of video that shows how the puppetry and effects in the video were achieved.
Special thanks to "Scuba Steve" for finding this!
Thu Tran's Food Party is like no cooking show you've ever seen before.
Food Party is a new show on IFC that describes itself as a "mind-bending, non-reality cooking show" and is built around artist/food enthusiast Thu Tran and a cast of puppets who cook up all kinds of bizarre recipes together. Food Party grew out of an art installation and online series Thu created in her hometown of Cleveland and kind of defies explanation. It's a little bit like what Martha Stewart might look like if it was filmed it on the set of Pee Wee's Playhouse.
In an interview with Thu about the genesis of Food Party, Gothamist called Food Party "quite possibly the only cooking program you should be watching" and I'm inclined to agree. It's independent, wacky, weird and exactly the kind of thing we need more of on TV.
Food Party debuts on IFC next Tuesday at 11:15 ET/PT. A bunch of Food Party videos are available on the IFC website, including a look behind the scenes.
I'm really happy to announce today that I'm going to be offering a nine week, interactive online puppet building course, Puppet Building 101.
This is an intensive nine week course I'll be offering via PuppetBuilding.com that is designed to take you step-by-step through the process of how you to build exactly the kinds of puppets you want to make. The course has a couple of components, including:
Gareth Oliver is a talented British Ventriloquist who appeared on the latest season of Britain's Got Talent.
With all the worldwide media attention heaped on Susan Boyle during the latest season of Britain's Got Talent, a really talented Ventriloquist on the show has somewhat overlooked - Gareth Oliver. He debuted on the show with a really unique act - throwing his voice while performing martial arts - and wowed the audience and judges with a spoof of badly dubbed Kung Fu movies. In the second round he switched gears and performed an opera-singing puppet named Pav (built by previous Britain's Got Talent contestants the Gluvets). Gareth almost made it through to the finals and actually received enough public votes to get into the top three, but was cut when the judges had to break a tie between him and singer Shaun Smith.
Even though Gareth may not have won the competition, appearing on Britain's Got Talent is already boosting his career. The website of E3 Group (the firm that represents Gareth in the UK) have reported record traffic on their site since his appearances and say that hundreds of people have been inquiring about his availability. He'll also be making extensive promotional appearances for ITV in the UK, so it looks like it will be a happy ending for him after all.
Author: Andrew
From: Ontario, Canada
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