Sketch Of The Week

Before I paint one of our puppet show backgrounds, I do a series of rough sketches. For our puppet show Harry and the Tyrannosaurus Rex I wanted to accurately represent Montana during the Late Cretaceous period. I did some research about the different types of plants and trees of the time. I learned that grass hadn't appeared yet, the most common trees were conifers, and flowers were a rare find. I incorporated the information I learned into this color pencil sketch.

Exhibit Extended

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences exhibit "It's Alive" has been extended through Sept. 10. If you haven't seen the exhibit yet, I recommend you check it out. Where else can you see Fizzgig and the Predator in the same room?



The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is located at 8949 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. The exhibit is open Tuesday through Friday, from 10 am to 5 pm, and weekends, from noon to 6 pm. Admission is free.

To see more photos from the exhibit, check out my Flicker photo set.

Swazzle Stuff Coming Soon

I've been designing some fun Swazzle T-shirts and other merchandise that will be available exclusively through our new online store. Here is one I'm particularly proud of.

Submissions

Puppet Design Readers,

I'd like to feature some of your work on my Puppet Design blog. Please send me a favorite design you've done, along with a photo of the finished puppet. Include a brief bio and a short description of the work. The entries I select will be included in future posts. Just email your submission to PatrickPuppet@yahoo.com, and be sure to put "puppet design" in the subject line.

Thank you. I'm looking forward to seeing your work!

Fash

A few months ago I collaborated with a group of illustrators and character designers at the commercial production company Harvest to design the head of "Fash," a new puppet featured in a series of Old Navy commercials. The puppet, which stars in several adds and short films, was built by Rick Lazzarini's Character Shop. To see Fash in action, check out his website.

Sam Hale Interview

Sam Koji Hale is an illustrator, sculptor, puppet designer and builder. He has a master of fine arts in illustration from Academy of Art University in San Francisco and has designed and built puppets for a variety of film, video and theatre productions. His credits include Elf and Playhouse Disney's “Clay,” as well as Ahoy Captain Sid, which earned him two regional Emmy nominations. He received The Kennedy Center Award for his puppet design and construction on The Inland Emperor's New Clothes. Hale recently designed and built puppets for a Triumvirate Pi Theatre presentation of The Fox's Lantern (Kitsune No Chochin), a project he co-created and will puppeteer in.

Hale is Adjunct Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University San Bernardino. I asked him to share his thoughts on puppet design.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13

Sam Hale Interview Part 13

Sam Koji Hale is an illustrator, sculptor, puppet designer and builder. He has a master of fine arts in illustration from Academy of Art University in San Francisco and has designed and built puppets for a variety of film, video and theatre productions. His credits include Elf and Playhouse Disney's “Clay,” as well as Ahoy Captain Sid, which earned him two regional Emmy nominations. He received The Kennedy Center Award for his puppet design and construction on The Inland Emperor's New Clothes. Hale recently designed and built puppets for a Triumvirate Pi Theatre presentation of The Fox's Lantern (Kitsune No Chochin), a project he co-created and will puppeteer in.

Hale is Adjunct Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University San Bernardino. I asked him to share his thoughts on puppet design.



PJ: What is your next creative project?

SH: I’ve always got a handful of projects at various levels of development. It’s been an exciting and satisfying run on The Fox Lantern as production designer, builder and performer, but I’ve been leaning toward creating some shorter puppetry pieces for video or hybrid animation (something that gives me more excuse to be home with my 1 year-old, Kai).

A few of the bigger ideas percolating right now: “Xamoschi: Village of Crows,” inspired by a “lost” chapter of Gulliver’s Travels; “Trickster,” the misadventures of “misunderstood” Norse trickster Loki; and puppet shorts adapted from stories by Miyazawa Kenji and Jorge Luis Borges.

Sam Hale Interview Part 12

Sam Koji Hale is an illustrator, sculptor, puppet designer and builder. He has a master of fine arts in illustration from Academy of Art University in San Francisco and has designed and built puppets for a variety of film, video and theatre productions. His credits include Elf and Playhouse Disney's “Clay,” as well as Ahoy Captain Sid, which earned him two regional Emmy nominations. He received The Kennedy Center Award for his puppet design and construction on The Inland Emperor's New Clothes. Hale recently designed and built puppets for a Triumvirate Pi Theatre presentation of The Fox's Lantern (Kitsune No Chochin), a project he co-created and will puppeteer in.

Hale is Adjunct Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University San Bernardino. I asked him to share his thoughts on puppet design.



PJ: What advice would you give young artists interested in designing characters and puppets?

SH: If you do it, commit! It’s tough getting started and takes time to get established, but work at it and you should make headway. I’ve seen too many really talented artists waste their abilities because they’re too afraid to take the chance, quit their jobs and go for it. If you try and fail, that’s one thing, but if you’ve never tried, that’s just sad. Use your skills to bring something new and different to this boring world.

In the world of puppetry, especially, I think there’s lots of room for talented artists to create new work. I seem to run into many performers involved in puppetry who just settled into puppetry, rather than appreciating the beauty and power that puppets can have in and of themselves. I think the people who end up really making a difference in puppetry are those who grasp and appreciate what I’d call the mystery of puppetry and use it to make something inspiring and stunning for audiences to appreciate and enjoy.

Other important things: If you don’t know how, learn to draw. A drawing is the blueprint for your puppet. It will save you lots of time later on in the process when you’re trying to realize the puppet three-dimensionally. You don’t build a house or a car without a blueprint or design in hand. Why attack a puppet design differently? If you mess up when building, you’ve got to make up a lot more time than if you mess up a drawing and simply need to redraw it. I tell my college students this all the time, but I see too many of them making mistakes they could have avoided if they’d just drawn something first.

Last, I encourage young artists to find their voice, find their style. No matter how talented you may be, if you don’t have a way to express it uniquely, you’re not living honestly with what’s waiting to spring from inside you. There are a lot of really talented imitators around, and they’ll probably find work in the studios out there, but do you want to be drawing like Walt Disney all your life? Don’t be an imitator, be an innovator. It’s challenging, but I think the long-term reward is worth the blood, sweat, tears and debt.

Sam Hale Interview Part 11

Sam Koji Hale is an illustrator, sculptor, puppet designer and builder. He has a master of fine arts in illustration from Academy of Art University in San Francisco and has designed and built puppets for a variety of film, video and theatre productions. His credits include Elf and Playhouse Disney's “Clay,” as well as Ahoy Captain Sid, which earned him two regional Emmy nominations. He received The Kennedy Center Award for his puppet design and construction on The Inland Emperor's New Clothes. Hale recently designed and built puppets for a Triumvirate Pi Theatre presentation of The Fox's Lantern (Kitsune No Chochin), a project he co-created and will puppeteer in.

Hale is Adjunct Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University San Bernardino. I asked him to share his thoughts on puppet design.



PJ: How do you promote yourself as an artist, designer and illustrator?

SH: The most important thing: Get your name out there! That’s the first big step. Then keep reminding people that you are there. For the lucky ones living in areas close to all the action, it’s probably less work than for those out in the boonies who have to spend $2,000 yearly to put their ads in national artist-resource books, direct mailings, etc.

I find my website (www.mysticgnome.com) is an invaluable and inexpensive advertising tool. I remember spending hours in art school creating these beautiful portfolios, but I rarely used them after graduating -- prospective illustration and puppetry clients seem to prefer online portfolios. The website is an instant portal for a potential client to see your work, and it’s fast and doesn’t require them to mail your portfolio back after they’ve flipped through it. Once you’ve made that contact, send a tear sheet or sample of your work with a resume so they can keep it on file.

But the website isn’t an end in itself. You still need to point people to it. I get most of my work from answering ads online or hearing about a job through my network of contacts. No matter how you advertise and find job posts, keep in mind that it’s a constantly challenging and changing landscape -- illustrators compete with photography, stock images, etc., all of which are readily available at low, low prices. Puppetry competes with animation but potentially offers big savings for the client. Your pricing needs to be competitive, and you need a style that people are going to want to use. Get out there, beat the bushes, and build that network and client base!

Sam Hale Interview Part 10

Sam Koji Hale is an illustrator, sculptor, puppet designer and builder. He has a master of fine arts in illustration from Academy of Art University in San Francisco and has designed and built puppets for a variety of film, video and theatre productions. His credits include Elf and Playhouse Disney's “Clay,” as well as Ahoy Captain Sid, which earned him two regional Emmy nominations. He received The Kennedy Center Award for his puppet design and construction on The Inland Emperor's New Clothes. Hale recently designed and built puppets for a Triumvirate Pi Theatre presentation of The Fox's Lantern (Kitsune No Chochin), a project he co-created and will puppeteer in.

Hale is Adjunct Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University San Bernardino. I asked him to share his thoughts on puppet design.



PJ: Talk about the puppets you recently designed and are currently building for the show The Fox Lantern. What inspired the look of the characters?

SH: The Fox Lantern came out of discussion with Leslie Gray, the director of a show I worked on last year called Pink Dress. We wanted to tell an antiwar folktale and use a design idea we started developing more than a year ago. The idea was to build Japanese doll-like puppets that could be performed with one hand. In order to do this, I developed a spring mechanism in the head, neck and shoulders that would allow the puppeteer to either hold the puppet with one hand and be able to swivel the head with their thumb, or operate the torso and head separately with two hands.

We call these kinds of bunraku puppets “spring-yos,” combining the word spring with the Japanese word for puppet, ningyo. There’s a cool demon puppet in the story that has a second spring mimicking the spinal column and supporting the weight of the puppet while allowing movement in the upper and lower torso. I’m pretty pleased with this design innovation.





The puppets are about 18-20 inches tall and generally require two puppeteers -- one for the torso, head and hand(s), and one for the feet or hands. (We’ve basically eliminated one puppeteer from the traditional bunraku trio of performers.) The puppets are a mixed-media blend of paper clay, foam, wood, handmade paper, stretch mesh and metal. I sculpted heads out of paper clay and then molded them with silicone gel in a plaster mother mold to be able to duplicate them. I got a lot of materials and advice from Burman Industries, including paper clay directly from the Japanese company’s website at www.paperclay.com. (I discovered paper clay, or kami nendo, when I lived in Japan -- kids there love the stuff! And it’s made with volcanic ash!) The Fox Lantern is primarily performed with modified tabletop bunraku puppets and embellished with marionettes and shadow puppets.



The look of Fox Lantern: Overall, I’d say the style is my style, which is influenced by the works of El Greco, Tamara de Lempika, Thomas Hart Benton, Mike Mignola and Yoshitoshi. It’s a flowing style balancing soft and hard angles and hard shapes with soft shapes, all pushing and pulling against each other. For the projected backgrounds (slides made in Photoshop on a Mac), I drew heavily from classic woodblock artists Hokusai and Hiroshige. I also referenced many Yoshitoshi woodblock prints composition and costume ideas. I would design characters and costumes and then pass them on to Leslie Gray, an accomplished designer and builder who made gorgeous costumes for our puppets.



Last year I got a chance to study Japanese bunraku puppets up close when artist Masaya Kiritake toured the West Coast. She was an immense resource for this project. A lot of ideas came out of our one-on-one exchange, especially the idea that the base of a traditional Japanese puppet, the kashira, is what the rest of the puppet is built around. The torso is actually hollow in traditional Japanese puppets. I used these ideas, but rather than carving the kashira out of wood, I built it from an industrial base of PVC pipe, springs and epoxy putty. I wrapped that in L-200 foam and finished it off with a well-sculpted paper clay head. I’m really happy how well the springs contribute to the head movement overall -- it’s smooth and controllable. The research-and-development period was quite lengthy to get the right balance of materials, durability vs. flexibility, etc. But now that I have the process down, expect to see me making more of these kinds of puppets!

Sam Hale Interview Part 9

Sam Koji Hale is an illustrator, sculptor, puppet designer and builder. He has a master of fine arts in illustration from Academy of Art University in San Francisco and has designed and built puppets for a variety of film, video and theatre productions. His credits include Elf and Playhouse Disney's “Clay,” as well as Ahoy Captain Sid, which earned him two regional Emmy nominations. He received The Kennedy Center Award for his puppet design and construction on The Inland Emperor's New Clothes. Hale recently designed and built puppets for a Triumvirate Pi Theatre presentation of The Fox's Lantern (Kitsune No Chochin), a project he co-created and will puppeteer in.

Hale is Adjunct Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University San Bernardino. I asked him to share his thoughts on puppet design.



PJ: You've designed puppets for several theatrical productions. What do you take into consideration when designing puppets for the stage?

SH: How a puppet reads from a distance is very important. Big shapes and bold colors help a puppet read well for the audience. Lighting contributes to readability, and the stronger the shapes in the character’s face, the easier it is to read the face from a distance, even in bad lighting. How you color the character can also aid in readability -- again, bold, contrasting colors work great. In Japanese theater, actors’ (and puppets’) faces are painted a stark white with black eyeliner and red lipstick. Theater came way before electricity, so performances happened by candlelight, and the only way to see the performers was to paint their faces brightly and boldly!

Another thing to consider is what the production’s puppet needs are, versus building an all-around good puppet for general use. When I first go in to planning a build, I look at the script and start a list of all the actions that will be needed from my puppet. Then I start planning how to build “specialists.” The more specialized the puppet is, the better it can perform its tasks. If you need a puppet to climb out of the scene, a “climber” puppet works better than a generic one. Even if it means more building, I prefer having more puppets that perform specific tasks than a few generic ones. For example, if you only see a puppet from the waist up, why give him legs?

Also, building something tough but simple is better for theater. If a puppet is going to go through a lot of rough handling, it’s better if it holds together well. The fewer moving parts there are, the less likely it will break and need repair. On a TV or film shoot, a damaged puppet could cause an inconvenient loss of time for repairs, but in live theater there’s no time for repairs. The better built the puppet is, the better it is for the show. Simplicity is important -- the fewer moving parts, the less likely it is to break. Again, I say build more specialists to do specific tasks and reduce the need for repairs along the way.



Ease of use is also something I’m constantly trying to perfect. I hate it when someone builds a puppet that’s heavier than necessary or has triggers or mouth palettes that don’t move well or that tweaks your wrist or arm to even get it to move. If it doesn’t work well, the performer has to struggle to make it work or, worse yet, hurt him- or herself to make the puppet move well. I really try to work toward practical solutions that make the puppet and performer both look and feel good.

I once did a show where I was squat-walking most of the time because I was performing hands on a modified bunraku-style puppet held at waist level. My knees have never been the same. Was it necessary to torture the puppeteer thus, or could the puppet have been designed differently? Could the director and builder have come up with a more performer-friendly design? Of course there is always some level of difficulty performing a puppet becasue it puts you into all kinds of strange contortions, but since I’m a performer too, I try to minimize that as much as possible. I sympathize with the poor saps who have to deal with my inventions onstage in front of a bunch of people.

Sam Hale Interview Part 8

Sam Koji Hale is an illustrator, sculptor, puppet designer and builder. He has a master of fine arts in illustration from Academy of Art University in San Francisco and has designed and built puppets for a variety of film, video and theatre productions. His credits include Elf and Playhouse Disney's “Clay,” as well as Ahoy Captain Sid, which earned him two regional Emmy nominations. He received The Kennedy Center Award for his puppet design and construction on The Inland Emperor's New Clothes. Hale recently designed and built puppets for a Triumvirate Pi Theatre presentation of The Fox's Lantern (Kitsune No Chochin), a project he co-created and will puppeteer in.

Hale is Adjunct Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University San Bernardino. I asked him to share his thoughts on puppet design.



PJ: Do you ever get stuck on a design? Do you have any tricks or techniques for getting the creative juices flowing?

SH: Everyone gets stuck from time to time. Some things I do to get past a block include going on a long drive or subway ride, sitting in the hot tub (or hot shower) or going somewhere I’ve never been before -- anything that relaxes the mind and takes me out of the context of my regular life rhythms. I always find myself inspired when I go to the in-laws’ up in the Monterey area because I’m out of my element there. A relaxing stroll on the beach or watching the waves roll in can be very nice too. These kinds of things help to get the juices flowing again.



As for specific techniques, wasn’t it Da Vinci who wrote something about being inspired by flames? I try to find chaotic, nonsensical shapes and forms in things like marble, tile flooring, and even clouds in the sky and make images from them. As an extension of this idea, I’ll scribble things on paper without looking and then pull shapes from the nonsense. I like to call this my scribble technique. Basically, I look around the room as I let my pencil wander, picking out shapes and bits and pieces of stuff from all over. After covering the page with lots of scribbles and scratches, I take a Sharpie and start tracing just the lines I like. Sometimes I get interesting results!

Sam Hale Interview Part 7

Sam Koji Hale is an illustrator, sculptor, puppet designer and builder. He has a master of fine arts in illustration from Academy of Art University in San Francisco and has designed and built puppets for a variety of film, video and theatre productions. His credits include Elf and Playhouse Disney's “Clay,” as well as Ahoy Captain Sid, which earned him two regional Emmy nominations. He received The Kennedy Center Award for his puppet design and construction on The Inland Emperor's New Clothes. Hale recently designed and built puppets for a Triumvirate Pi Theatre presentation of The Fox's Lantern (Kitsune No Chochin), a project he co-created and will puppeteer in.

Hale is Adjunct Professor of Theatre Arts at California State University San Bernardino. I asked him to share his thoughts on puppet design.



PJ: Talk about the difference between designing a character for a two-dimensional format and one that will be built in three dimensions.

SH: Most of my designs start as two-dimensional drawings, so there isn’t that big a difference in designing for two dimensions than three. One serves as the foundation for the other. Drawing flat art is the starting point for creating more sophisticated art -- my teachers at art school always said that if you are a strong draftsman, you should be able to paint or sculpt well too. A good drawing becomes a good painting or good sculpture.

That being said, moving to three dimensions adds another level of complexity. You need to be aware of shapes from multiple perspectives and how a character reads from different angles. In general, the more variety you get in a form as it turns, the more interesting it is to look at. A character with a long snout will be more interesting to look at than a character with flat features. Turn the character around and look at it from multiple perspectives -- in the mirror, upside down, etc. -- to get a sense whether the shapes are interesting and exciting to look at from every perspective.



You can get an interesting variety of expressions in a 3-D character. Depending on how you design the shapes in the face, the same character can look satisfied from one angle and upset from another. It can be fun to play with asymmetry too.

If you have a character with a raised eyebrow on one side and a half-closed eye on the other, it will look angry from one angle and sleepy from the other (puppeteer Rob D’Arc, a brilliant puppet designer, has experimented with kinds of ideas). If you work with asymmetry, one thing to keep in mind is how the shapes contrast and balance against one another. Yet another thing to keep in mind is the flow of shapes around and into each other as seen from different angles, and it gets tricky finding a really strong balance of movement and form with asymmetrical characters.