The Bear Town Production Journal

Life imitates..?

2009-05-23T05:42:00.003-05:00

One of the most challenging things about creating an entire world for puppets to inhabit is that, well, you have you create an entire world for puppets to inhabit. To that end, as part of the ongoing development work on Bear Town, over the years I've created a lot of production and concept art for various parts of Marmora, the fictional puppetropolis where Bear Town takes place. One of those designs is this street sign concept art, which I think I made in CorelDraw about four years ago.

So I got a little weirded out today reading about the new design of Toronto's street signs (which haven't yet seen in person) on BlogTO and saw this photo:

Maybe if this puppetry thing doesn't pan out I have a future in municipal street sign design?

The Hunt For Gollum

2009-05-05T22:07:00.006-05:00

Watching The Hunt For Gollum - which is quite possibly the most impressive fan film ever made - I can't help but think that if they can do that for just £3,000 (less than $5,000 Canadian) it's totally possible to make Bear Town on a small budget and make it look great.

You can watch the entire film on Daily Motion in HD. Very inspiring.

Back To Puppet Building

2009-04-29T07:31:00.006-05:00

Today is going to be a fun day, I'm back to puppet building for the first time in a long time. I have something of a love/hate relationship with building puppets. I enjoy it as a purely creative outlet, but don't like to be rushed or work on a deadline (this is one of many reasons I generally don't do work-for-hire jobs). It's always nice to come back to it when I have been away from it for a long time though.

I'm not working on Bear Town puppets today, although I am building for something that will hopefully pave the way towards Bear Town. There's something of a proper team - dare I say "dream team" - being assembled for that, but I don't want to risk jinxing the whole thing by saying too much too soon. There have already been enough false starts documented here.

Suffice to say, the next year or two will be busy if all goes according to plan and Bear Town is part of the plan. Here's hoping.

What I've Been Up To

2008-09-10T17:02:00.002-05:00

Well, isn't it always the way...just as I was planning to get things back on track with Bear Town life got in the way I got sidetracked by something else. Only this time it was something very, very cool - I started working with a bunch of other puppeteers and puppet builders in Toronto and I've done more puppetry work in the past nine months than I had in previous two and a half years. The video above is of our first public performance back in February.

We've been focused on doing bunraku-style puppetry work which has got me thinking about a totally different approach to the puppetry in Bear Town. I'm not really sure when I'll be back at Bear Town full-tilt, but the gears in my head are turning.

Wok With Marshall

2008-03-03T01:09:00.005-06:00

Wok With Marshall was the first episode of The Marshall and Buck Show, which was - to my knowledge anyway - the internet's first puppet web series. The series was built around two characters I originally created for my Bear Town project, Marshall and Buck. Each episode featured Marshall and Buck engaging in some kind of activity like cooking, acting, or putting on a magic show that would go horribly awry. Four episodes of the show were sporadically produced between 1997 and 2000, starting with Wok With Marshall which was shot in 1997, but didn't premiere online until March 10, 2000.

Unfortunately, because I don't own any of the master tapes from the series it hasn't been available online for a long time, but I did recently find a high quality dub of Wok With Marshall so I thought I would share it here. It's a little rough, but keep in mind that we did make it over ten years ago.

The puppeteers in the video are the brilliant Shawn Hazelton (Marshall), myself (Buck) and Kim Mahony and Pauline Antonopoulos, who performed the Happy Meal puppets and Betsy, Marshall and Buck's cow. The video was directed by Brenda Tan, who's also credited as the writer although I seem to remember that half of this was ad-libbed on set.

Simple is always better

2008-02-28T22:21:00.006-06:00

I'm embarrassed to admit this, but it was only this past week that I finally saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time. This is one of the funniest (and most famous) scenes in the movie; Indy has survived a mad chase/fight through the casbah only to be confronted by a big guy with an even bigger sword and some flashy skills. Exhausted and in no mood to fight, Indy pulls out his gun and shoots the sword-wielding bad guy dead.

Legend has it that this famous scene came about because Harrison Ford had a developed a terrible case of dysentery filming the movie in Tunisia. As scripted, the fight scene between Indy and the swordsman would have required three days to shoot, so Ford - presumably motivated by a desire to spend less time suffering in the heat and more time on the toilet - suggested "why don't I just shoot the guy?".

As the cliche says, necessity is the mother of invention.

This simple gag probably plays much better than whatever fight scene had been originally scripted and is a good example how simpler is almost always better. I was reminded of the "K.I.S.S." principle today while working on the Bear Town script on the way home from my office. The script was originally written as an independent feature and I have been carving it up in to small chunks that will work as 3-5 minute webisodes.

There are sections of the script I really don't like; the dialogue is clunky and the story doesn't feel like it flows naturally. I was really struggling to figure out how to make a couple scenes work tonight when it suddenly occurred to me that I could just cut them. That in turn inspired me to reorder a couple other scenes and eliminate a few more. In a span of fifteen minutes on the bus I probably cut thirty pages of script down to ten. Everything is much shorter, simpler and (most importantly) funnier.

Simple really is better.

Figurenschneider and (no) Antron Fleece

2008-02-03T20:02:00.000-06:00

There was quite a buzz in the puppet blogosphere recently about Figurenschneider, a German puppet company run by Norman Schneider. I'm not sure who was the first to spot the site, but I saw mentions of it on the dotBoom Blog and Thistledown Puppets among others. Norman's puppets have a unique, hand crafted and time-worn quality to them that you see in a lot of European puppets (especially German ones) for some reason. They look a little different and I think we need more of that in puppetry, especially here in North America.

What I thought was most refreshing about them was that they don't look like they were made with Antron Fleece.

Antron Fleece, if you don't already know, is the material most commonly used to make Muppet-style television puppets, so much so that it's often referred to as "Muppet Fleece". It has a heavy pile (meaning it's fuzzy) that disguises seams and it can be dyed to any colour. The only problem is that you can't buy it at your local fabric store and for along time the information about how to order it was a jealously guarded secret in the television industry. That all changed about eight or nine years ago when thanks to the internet. Once "the secret" was out lots of puppet builders started working with Antron fleece. As more and more people started using Antron fleece I started noticing that more and more the puppets I saw on the internet had the same sort of "Antron look" to them.

I designed many of Bear Town's characters when I was a teenager in high school. Although back then I didn't work with Antron fleece, I was - and in many ways still am - heavily influenced by The Muppets. As I start rebuilding the Bear Town puppets I've come to realize that unless I want to redesign all of them I'm stuck working with a style of puppet that could end up looking very Muppety or derivative if I'm not careful. So the challenge then is how to do I make Bear Town's puppets more visually interesting and original?

I don't have all the answers yet, but I think one of the best ways start is try working with materials other than Antron Fleece and experiment with using different materials and different textures. Whatever I do, I want Bear Town's puppets looking less like this:

And more like this:

I'm also thinking I should review an old blog post I wrote for PuppetVision called Rules For Puppet Revolutionaries.

Opening Titles

2008-01-08T10:50:00.003-06:00

Starting work on Bear Town again, it makes sense to start at the beginning. I have always been a fan of really creative opening sequences, especially the work of Kyle Cooper and his company Prologue Films. I've always had a bit of a block about what Bear Town's opening sequence should be like and so recently I have been looking for inspiration.

I went to see Juno last weekend and really loved its hand-drawn animated opening credits by Shadowplay Studio, which have been creating a lot of buzz on the internet lately (you can watch them above via YouTube, but a higher quality version can be found here).

Shadowplay also did the opening credits for Thank You For Smoking, which like Juno was also directed by Jason Reitman (for a higher quality version click here).

On the puppet podcasting front, I really like the titles/credits that Brian Hogg creates for his various podcasts. The dotBoom opening (above) is one of my favourites and the opening to his Inside Hoggworks video blog features some great use of typography.

I'm still not sure what I am going to do, but I have been playing with the idea of incorporating shadow puppets or at least a shadow puppet aesthetic. A few years ago I was involved with the development of a 2D digital puppetry system called Flash Puppet that allowed puppeteers to create Flash animation using puppetry for a proposed cable show called Suzie Shadow. The project never got green lighted, but it would be fun to play with the technology again.

I will have to think about this a little more. Until then, if like me you're interested in film titles and motion graphics, a great web site to visit is Forget The Film, Watch The Titles.

The World's Angriest Puppets (original and uncut)

2008-01-01T14:25:00.000-06:00

Here's some more blast-from-the past video...The World's Angriest Puppets (TWAP!) began as an attempt to film a Bear Town TV pilot as a special year-end project when I was studying Radio/Television broadcasting in college. As I think I've explained here before, myself and the classmates who worked on this grossly underestimated the amount of time and resources that were required to pull off such an ambitious project. When we realized that we weren't going to finish the video in time to get a grade and pass the course I panicked and decided to take most of the footage we had shot along with shots from other puppet videos I had been working on and randomly splice it all together to make an "experimental film".

I completely cop to the fact I was just desperate to pass my course with this, but I do remember being heavily influenced by Jim Henson's Timepiece at the time and I tried to give the video a similar sort of stream-of-consciousness feel. The name "The World's Angriest Puppets" was a random one that I think just adds to the (somewhat intentional) unevenness of "TWAP". I look back at this video now as kind of failed experiment. It may not make a lot sense when you see it here, but it was the beginnings of Bear Town.

One problem with this video is that it has some uncleared music in it. I've always wanted to include this as an extra on a Bear Town DVD eventually, but that would require going back and editing out the uncleared material. There's also a couple sections in this that drag a bit so I think it might be fun to pull a George Lucas and go back and make a few changes. Nothing major, just tighten up some of the editing, redo the titles and reframe a couple shots where the puppeteers' heads show.

Until then, enjoy The World's Angriest Puppets original and uncut.

Old Outtakes

2007-12-29T23:01:00.000-06:00

I was going through an old hard drive I store a lot of Bear Town-related material on and came across these outtakes from the first two episodes of the 2004 web series. Most of the funny in this is courtesy of Hank, performed by the very talented (and funny!) Chris Grom.

Thinking About Matte Painting

2007-12-27T11:14:00.000-06:00

This is one of the most incredible examples of digital painting that I've ever seen. It's a panorama of Damen Station in Chicago by Bert Monroy, who specializes in photo realistic digital art. There are no photographic or 3D elements in it whatsoever; Bert did it all with Photoshop and Illustrator. The image above is too small to even begin doing it justice so click here to see a larger image and read an overview that explains how it was created.

My heads hurts just thinking about attempting something like this.

I'm continuing to slowly gear up to begin work on Bear Town again in the new year and thinking about all of the different elements involved, including matte painting (that's how I stumbled across the painting above). I haven't attempted any matte painting for a long time so to get my hands dirty I am tackling a shot that requires mixing 2D and 3D elements to create a virtual set. Nothing nearly as complex as Bert's work, but I thought it would be fun to make it the subject of a little tutorial which should appear here in the next day or so.

Bears in Ill-Fitting Hats

2007-12-12T11:25:00.000-06:00

After spending two years bouncing back and forth between Toronto, Mexico, Alberta and Atlantic Canada I'm settling down in Ontario and gearing up to start work on Bear Town again after a long hiatus. More details will probably follow in a few weeks.

For now I am drawing tremendous inspiration from this great Flickr pool of illustrations of bears in ill-fitting hats.

A Long Overdue Update

2006-09-20T23:58:00.000-05:00

The budget for Bear Town was put together over the summer. After doing a complete breakdown of the film's script and crunching the numbers and then crunching them again I was able to work out that the minium budget the film needs to be completed and still look fairly professional is $235,000. Unfortunately, it looks like realistically that the maximum amount that could be raised to make the movie right now is about $150,000. As much as that might sound like a lot of money, it's just not going to cut it.

Bear Town is a big, complex and expensive project to do with puppets. That's the reason it's taken over a decade to be able to do it. This was a very disappointing conclusion to come to, but I've decided that if I've had to wait this long to make the film I don't want to compromise and waiting a little longer won't be so bad. Over the summer I put most of the Bear Town puppets (both finished and unfinished) in to storage in Canada before coming back to Mexico in mid-August.

The summer has been spent developing a couple of other projects. One hit the web a little while ago, PuppetBuilding.com a new web site devoted entirely to puppet building. It's updated several times a week with puppet building news, information and tutorials. The site also has a Puppet Building Wiki which I hope will become a large collaborative effort to pool puppetry information. I'm doing a video podcast for the site as well, the first installment should be up sometime this weekend.

I can't talk much about the second project just yet, but I'm really excited about it. It's something relatively cheap that I've wanted to do for a long, long time. I've barely done any puppetry since the aborted Bear Town web series in 2004 so I'm eager to get away from the computer and back to what I really love to do.

I'd like to thank everyone who's followed the long, torturous development of Bear Town on the site. Although I doubt it will be updated much for the next year or two it will stay online. As for Omle, Hank and Tumbles and Bear Town? Don't worry, I'll get back to them when the time is right.

Meantime I'm still writing about puppetry daily in the PuppetVision Blog and now PuppetBuilding.com.

See you soon!

Dirty floors and puppets

2006-07-04T12:12:00.000-05:00

I'm back in Toronto for a little while and things got off to a rocky start when I arrived from Texas and at the apartment where I'm staying two weeks ago. It was probably the fithiest, most disgusting apartment I've ever been inside (the gross picture of swept up dirt above does not even begin to do justice to the amount of dirt and cat hair there was in this place. It was supposed to be "fully furnished with all amenities (cable, internet, linens, etc.) but when I arrived there was no T.V. no internet, no bed sheets, towels, etc. When the dirt was pointed out to the fellow looking after the place (the landlord is convienently in California) he recommended going to a nearby dollar store and buying a mop. I actually took pictures of the mess out of fear that people would think I was exaggerating when I told them about it.

Three full cleanings of the apartment later friends are no longer afraid to sit on the furniture.

Housing and internet problems aside, I've been trying to tie up the last few loose ends of my life in Toronto and I'm cleaning out puppet stuff from storage. I've been taking an inventory of furs, fabric and other miscellaneous puppet making stuff and going through all of the previously-built Bear Town puppets deciding what's usable, what needs to be rebuilt and what needs to be thrown out and/or given away.

Above is a box of puppets (actually the contents of several boxes) that I unpacked this week - some discarded pigs and chickens left over from a shoot a few years ago, pet store animals made from the 2004 Bear Town web series, a few small store-bought bear puppets, a granny character and an old version of Professor Jackal, one of Bear Town's villains.

I did a huge purging of puppet stuff when my old puppetry shop had to shut down in 2003, but it's amazing to see the stuff I still have lying around. A good chunk of it I'm packing up and sending to a friend who teaches puppetry workshops for kids, but they can't take all of it so if you're in or near Toronto and looking for fur and puppet building supplies drop me a line at beartown [at symbol] bear-town dot com and I might be able to hook you up.

Packing up and shooting on the virtual backlot

2006-06-10T16:55:00.000-05:00

I'm starting to pack up my workshop in Mexico today.

It's kind of annoying to be doing this because it feels like I just set it up. The problem is that was being provided for the production to use at no cost, which was wonderful, but it won't be available after the summer. Thankfully, I *think* (fingers crossed) another no/low cost space will be available to me when I return mid-August, but I won't be able to see it until then to decide if it's suitable or not.

Most of my work during the past two weeks has been on the film's script. I'm also starting to do a proper visual effects breakdown to get a handle on just how many shots will need digital work and how many puppets, props and sets need to be physically built and how many I can "cheat" using Blender and After Effects.

I just read a great article about Stargate Films, a company that is doing a lot of incredible work creating 3D digital sets or "virtual environments" for TV shows like E.R. and Crossing Jordan. I want to avoid using digital sets for Bear Town as much as possible, but it's incredible reading about all the advances that are being made in that area. One of the main techniques used to create these kinds of effects is called nodal point pan and tile and Joseph Francis has a great tutorial on it here.

One final note, some upgrades to the site are being done over the next week and I may not have Internet access from Monday through Wednesday so the result may be a little more down time, but hopefully not.

Minor updates

2006-06-01T16:46:00.000-05:00

I've updated The Bear Town Guide to Puppet Building Resources with a few new puppet building resources that have come to my attention over the past few months.

I've also recently made some minor changes to the About page and (as I mentioned yesterday) added some new images to the Conceptual Art Photoset on Flickr.

Sketching up ideas

2006-05-31T14:11:00.000-05:00

A sewer/reservoir set for Bear Town designed in SketchUp.

For the past several weeks I've been playing with the new free version of Google's SketchUp to design some of Bear Town's sets and environments and so far I'm very impressed. It's not without it's limitations, but it's a great way to quickly visualize ideas in 3D.

I designed the sewer/reservoir set above in SketchUp. It will be used as a set for a couple of scenes in Bear Town and it will most likely be realized as a digital set. I'm also working on the film's main 3D cityscape and I've been using SketchUp to play with rough designs for various buildings:

I've uploaded larger versions of all of these to the Conceptual Art Photoset on Flickr.

One thing that is particularly annoying is that although SketchUp will import a variety of common 3D file types, at the moment export options in the free version are limited to Google Earth files and image files (the pro version can export to .3ds, .dxf, .max and many other popular formats). Thankfully, a Blender user named J.M. Soler has written a script to import SketchUp's Google Earth files in to Blender which has solved that problem.

Summer self-assignments

2006-05-25T01:56:00.000-05:00

Although I am currently in Mexico, I'm returning to Canada for the summer and trying to plan out my work schedule for the next few months. I've just recently gotten to a point here where my puppet building workshop is more or less set-up so it's not practical or economically feasible to transport a lot of stuff back to Canada, so instead the summer will be spent trying to meet some important benchmarks for Bear Town's development. There are a number of techniques that are going to be used extensively in the film that I want to "test drive" over the summer:

Composite puppet(s) with 2D matte paintings
2 1/2 D Matte Painting
Completely model and finish one 3D virtual set
Seamlessly integrate puppets in to a 3D digital set

Over the past week or so I had the flu so I've taken a bit of a break from puppet building for the film and I've been focused on writing and learning/mastering some of the more advanced features of Blender. I spend a few hours each morning working on the 3D end of things and then from one o'clock until about five each day I've been trying to work on polishing the script.

I'm planning to do a reading/workshop for the film in about six weeks and there is still a lot to do. I'm at a point where the first act is in relatively good shape, but the third and (especially) the second need a lot more work.

Elephant's Dream online today

2006-05-17T15:13:00.000-05:00

Elephant's Dream - the world's first completely open source 3D animated movie - was released online for free today under a Creative Commons license. It's a tremendous artistic achievement. The film's story is a little esoteric in nature and won't appeal to everyone (it reminds me a little of Chris Landreth's surreal 3D film The End), but it's absolutely beautiful. Elephant's Dream was made to showcase the potential of Blender as a production tool and it's done that in spades.

The best part of the Orange Project is that all of the digital assets and production files have also been released under a Creative Commons license so anyone can study, remake and remix the film or portions of it has much as they want. I haven't had time to go through all of the production files yet, but I've already seen a few assets that we'll probably use in Bear Town.

You can download the movie and all of it's production assets for free here.

Speaking of Blender and Bear Town, the first of the 3D virtual sets are coming together. I'm hoping that I'll be able to post some quick test renders in the next week or two.

- - - -

21/05/06 Update: Wikinews has a nice interview with Blender lead developer and Elephant's Dream producer Ton Roosendaal.

A Swarm of Angels

2006-05-09T11:45:00.000-05:00

I read about another interesting open movie project over at Boing Boing today. A Swarm of Angels is an experiment by British filmmaker/writer Matt Hansen to gather 50,000 angel investors paying £25 each to raise $1 million for an independently-produced open movie. Matt's signing up angels in batches: first 100, then 1,000, then 5,000, then 25,000, and finally 50,000. At each milestone the angels participate in different parts of the film production: script development, the trailer, pre-production, production, post-production, etc. It's also exciting to see who's consulting on the project - Creative Commons activist/EFF Fellow Cory Doctorow and Sci-Fi author Warren Ellis.

So far Matt has surpassed his first milestone - 100 angels - and he's now trying to reach 1,000. If you'd like to become one of the angels you can join here.

Again with the bandwidth problem

2006-05-01T10:36:00.000-05:00

The site is back online again (obviously, since you're reading this) after being down for about a week because it once again exceeded it's monthly bandwidth allowance. I'm working on arranging for more bandwidth over the next few days so that doesn't happen again this month.

In other news, I started working full-time on Bear Town puppets last week. I don't have anything that I'm ready to show just yet, but I am documenting the construction process for future puppet building tutorials.

New workshop

2006-04-19T20:26:00.000-05:00

I'm beginning to properly set-up my new puppet building workshop this week. It's not much to look at the moment, just this table in the corner of the room so far and a large closet not shown here that's great for storing supplies and puppets in. The worktable is just an old dining room table room that I'll be covering with cardboard to protect it's sureface.

As for the room itself is about 10' x 10', which is not all that big but fine for me since I am mostly working by myself at the moment. It has a small balcony off to one side where I can use contact cement or anything else that shouldn't be used indoors. Probably the coolest thing about it is that it has it's own well-venilated bathroom complete with a decent-sized shower that I'm very tempted to convert to a spray booth.

I start building puppets for Bear Town more or less full-time beginning Monday.

Cut-out cartoons

2006-04-09T16:01:00.000-05:00

A frame from The Adventures of Billy, Mike & Junior, a cut-out animation created by Ana, Aida, Maria Fernada and Ana Martha in one of my high school animation workshops this week.

I haven't been able to do much Bear Town work over the past week and a half because I was preparing and teaching a workshop for high school students on cut-out animation. It was a lot of work, but I think the 65 students I taught over three days this week really enjoyed it. Each day I explained the stop motion animation process, screened some documentaries about the making of recent stop motion films (Corpse Bride and the recent Dragon Superbowl commercial for United Airlines) and then divided the students up in to groups of five to make short cut out films inspired by Michel Gagne's Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets and The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello.

Here's a couple of the films that the students created (sorry for the .wmv files, we were working with Windows Moviemaker at the school):

"The Descent" (358 KB .wmv)
"The Guy" (195 KB .wmv)

I went back to the school on Friday to drop off a VCD of all the finished animation and several of the students came up to me asking questions about web sites where they could learn more about animation or where to buy supplies to make their own cut-out films. A few parents told me their children had come home after doing the workshop and started experimenting on their own with web cams and copies of Windows Moviemaker, which was really rewarding to hear.

I'm going to be away for most of the next week or so, but after that I'm planning to get back in to doing some serious puppet building work for Bear Town.

Bear Town: Reloaded

2006-03-29T23:41:00.000-06:00

Well, Bear Town is back.

"Back" in the sense that it is once again being actively developed, with a few changes. After spending the past year or so researching, experimenting and working out the details, I've decided to make Bear Town as a feature-length open movie.

What's an open movie?

Basically, an open movie is a film that makes it's footage and other source materials freely available for others to examine, experiment with and even remix in to their own movies. The Blender Foundation's Orange Project is probably the best example of this so far.

What this means is that the finished film will be released over the Internet under a Creative Commons license along with most of the resources (footage, 3D models, After Effects project files, etc.) used to create it. I even plan to release most of the puppet patterns that will be used for the puppet characters for others to learn from and improve on. For more details see the site's newly revised About page.

As you may have noticed, the web site is back online with more on the way. It's been reorganized in to several new sections - About, a Media Gallery, Behind-the-Scenes and the blog. There's no forum for the moment, but I will probably bring that back that some point.

According to the schedule I'm working with right now, Bear Town will be done in about two and half years, in the fall of 2008. The other change I'm making is that as an open movie I want to make the film collaboratively with other artists over the web. Taking this approach is really an experiment and like all experiments, I'm not entirely sure how it will turn out, but I can't wait to see how this develops.

Stay tuned.

Bear-Town.com back up and running

2006-02-28T10:37:00.000-06:00

Bear-Town.com is back up and running. Back with more soon.