Video transcript
Shadow and bunraku paper puppetry - 04. Approaches to shadow puppet workshops and creating a show

ALICE OSBORNE: So the challenges of puppetry workshops, some of the challenges, include there can be a little bit of chaos in the making section. So it's really good to have a clear plan and to have your materials sorted out and perhaps set up the room in stations and think about what the students are going to be using in terms of safety, scissors. I have, in the past, attached scissors by a string to a table so that they don't go running around because they get inspired and creative and then things can go a bit wild. So it's just good to map it all out, to have stations, and then have creativity within those limits.

Getting the light and the screen right, so it's great to block out as much light as possible. You only want to have one light source. If you have more than one light source, then you get a double shadow, which can really destroy the performance. So, best case scenario, you'd pull the blinds down and just have one light. If you are considering making a film with the shadow puppetry, you just need to make sure that you fix the camera in a certain spot, and you fix the light in a certain spot so that you're not messing with your scale all the time.

So in terms of making a puppetry performance, there are two ways that you can approach it. You can approach it by starting with a story to begin with, or you can start with the material. So if you were working on a certain story in your class, in other areas, you might want to choose that to then adapt into a puppetry performance. So you'd think about what characters are in it, then you'd make those characters, and then you build the story out of that or the performance relating back, referencing to the story.

Another way that you can do it is sort of the reverse of all that where the story comes out of the materials itself-- the materials themselves-- where the story comes out of the materials themselves. So rather than starting with a prescribed story, you come in with a whole heap of materials. It's sort of more a visual-based way of working. And you offer a myriad of materials to the students. And you say, go and pick up what you're attracted to, see what textures you like, what you like the feel of, what colours you like, and now just make something.

And then they'll come up with all sorts of different things. And then you have a look at the puppets that have been created. And then you say, OK, what story could we devise out of these puppets that have sprung to life in our room? But then you can still use the traditional story building techniques with that. They're coming from two different angles. One is letting the material speak, and one is remaining true to a prescribed story.

A good way to work is to have an experimental stage where you're looking where different students are coming out, having a look at what effects the puppets are making on the screen, learning from each other, and then perhaps working scene by scene where puppets might interact with each other. And then making sure that once we get to the performance stage, any time you're working with props or puppets, it's good to keep everything really organised, so everybody knows which side they're coming in from, and your puppets are all laid out and not getting tangled up. It's important with puppets to make sure that they have a spot where they live when they're not performing and that they go back to that spot.

In terms of how long a performance should be, it's really up to the situation that you're working with. But always, I find less is more. And you can work on something to be really precise and filled with inspiration in a short amount of time than you can get a good quality thing. But you can also go on improvising for hours if that's what you're interested in.

If you're working with puppetry over a number of lessons, which you really need to because the making always takes a little bit longer than you think it's going to, it's really nice to have some sessions where the students are free to really experiment in terms of trying something behind the screen and then coming out and having a look at it and seeing what effects are made so that they are surprised and you, as the teacher, will be surprised as well. And then, you throw it back to them and say, well, what does this look like? What could we use this for in our story?

I prefer masking tape to sticky tape when working with primary students is because masking tape, you can tear it with your fingers so even the very youngest students, you can have two little birds here. And you put the birds next to each other. And one bird goes one way, and the other goes the other way. And you don't need any scissors for that. If the students are really young, you can do all the cutting yourself once they have drawn the lines. And then they can use the sticky type themselves. So it's a safe way of working with minimum fuss.

And also, if you do need to help the students with their work, it's really lovely if you cut precisely to the lines that they have drawn when they're drawing out their shapes for the shadow puppets because it's important to make sure that they're aesthetic is transferred precisely to the screen rather than being lost in translation with your cutting techniques. And as well, it's nice to tell the students that as well if they are cutting out their own shapes to make sure they stick to their line work because they can come up with some beautiful stuff as you know with their drawing techniques.

Everything that I've shown you, they're just examples. And they're by no means the thing that you have to do. Really, it's absolutely only limited by the imagination of the students. And it's really fantastic if you throw the task over to them and say, for example, I want you to make a puppet with one moving part. It can be anything at all. And the puppets I've made are an example, but they might come up with creatures that are completely fantastical. Of course, they will. So it's good to give them a limited template in terms of, for example, one moving part, but then leave it entirely open so that they can surprise themselves with the results.

The fantastic thing about creating a puppetry performance is that there are so many different elements in the performance. And you can give different jobs to different students. So you could have a designer who designs all the puppets. You could have a director who's looking at putting the things together. And you can empower the kids with giving them these different roles. You can also have somebody who's concentrating just on scenery, and they might make all the scenery for the shadow puppet.

And you can have someone who's doing special effects that. So they might be using things like that and be the person who makes the hurricane or the person that makes the storm or the person that makes the bush fire. So you can separate into all these different roles so that kids who aren't necessarily confident with drawing can also find something that's really empowering for them and can accelerate their learning as well.

So once you've started to create your performance, that you can then add different layers to it. There are two parts to puppetry that are really fundamental in performance. One is the movement, and the other is the voice. And so a lot of voice artists transfer to puppetry because it's all about creating the character through the voice. So you can use sound effects. You can spend a lot of time finding the voice of the puppet and looking at the puppet that has been created and then thinking about what kind of sound it would make, and then if it would speak in language as we understand or not. And then also you can add music to the performance that the children could create or that you can source so that you start to add layers and layers and layers to make a really full sensory experience for the people who will be watching it.

In terms of making sure that the puppets don't get damaged, it's good to set up an area in the classroom where the puppet will live and not to have anyone touching the puppet except for the puppeteer who will be performing with it and potentially the puppet doctor, who will come in and fix the puppet if the puppet does get a little bit broken. But if they start getting handed around, and they don't have an anchored point where they live, they'll get lost and damaged. And there could be days.

There's a massive range of puppetry in media that you see. And sometimes you don't even recognise it. Often things, for example, TV commercials might be made partly animated and partly with a puppet. So a lot of the TV commercials that you see have puppetry in them as well. So obviously there's puppetry in children's theatre and children's television, but also, it's used in adult media as well. So there's a massive range. And since, really in England since War Horse the stage production was created.

Puppetry over the world has had a bit of a Renaissance. And now, most actors and performers have done a little bit of puppetry at least and will have that on their CV. So there's a large range. But also, there are things in films that are not necessarily a traditional puppet that you would imagine but special effects often use sort of puppetry techniques where something might move in a horror film that might look like it's flying across. The object might be puppeteered.

I recently worked with Monkey Bar on an adaptation of Jackie French's book, Diary of a Wombat. And Eva Di Cesare, the director, thought that puppetry would be a good vehicle to tell that story. And so we got a puppet maker, Brandy Anderson, to make a giant three-dimensional wombat that was our wombat called mothball. And we also got her to make a small wombat. And so we played with scale in terms of imagining that there was a far away, distance shot of the wombat and then a more close-up intimate experience with the wombat. I was the puppetry and movement director on that show.

And there's very little dialogue at all, so the whole show, there really only a few words. And the whole show was told through the visual movement of this wombat. That, and also, the puppeteer, Julia, who performed the wombat, had a mic. And she would do the grunting and the breathing and the scratching of the wombat. And that would tell how the wombat was feeling. And then we had a cello that was the sort of emotional voice of the wombat. And the cello was working live on stage-- the cellist who played the cello was working live on stage-- and mapping out the journey of the wombat's emotions and it's triumphs and obstacles as we go through the show.