My friend and sensei, Jerry Nelson, informed me that Google was celebrating the 93rd birthday of the late Dizzy Gillespie. I’ve always loved this man’s music and it has filled our house and our lives for many years. I used to hum “A Night In Tunisia” to my son when he was a mere babe in our arms.
Here’s Jerry, as Floyd, gettin’ his Bop on with the Diz:
Happy Birthday, Mr. Gillespie.
Cheers
20 years ago today Jim Henson died. He touched a lot of people with his work and made a big difference in a lot of people’s lives. Not bad for a puppeteer. He certainly changed the course of my life. These are two videos from the memorial held for Jim at New York’s St. John The Divine cathedral.
The first is comments and a song by Harry Belafonte and was, for me, the most memorable moment of the day.
As we had entered the church we’d been given little foam butterflies on long thin black rods. To the folks who puppeteered for Jim they knew these “toys” well. In his shows, in wide shots, there were often areas of the frame where no other characters were visible and he would often call for butterflies or other small critters to be wiggled from behind bushes and rocks to fill the frame with movement and life. It was perhaps the most rudimentary form of performance on the shows – lying on the studio floor and wiggling some floppy wings at the end of a rod – but it was always fun.
As Belafonte began to sing everyone in the crowd spontaneously raised their butterflies and waved them over their heads. The entire church sprang to life with colour and movement. I will never forget the surge of emotion which swept over us all.
The next is Jerry Nelson’s tribute to Jim where he, as Floyd, reads his poem to his Fearless Leader.
Thank you, Jim.
Geek alert! This an animation entitled: Pencil Test. It was created in 1988 to show what could be done on the then new Mac II computers.
I’ve been messing with CG for a while now and although I am far from being any sort of pro with packages like Cinema 4D, Blender and others – farting around with machinama too – I do enjoy what can be created with them. The tools just get better and better and the machines get faster and faster. The advances made in the field have been extraordinary.
Here’s the behind-the-scenes of Pencil Test. What’s extraordinary is they are talking about using computers with only 4 megabytes of RAM. 4 megs?! Christ – I have pencils with more memory now.
About 10 years ago I had the good fortune to meet up with Steve “Spaz” Williams and give him and his family a tour of our shop where we made our kids TV productions. He was lamenting the mechanical realism of CG at that time, where re-creating a faux reality was more important than innovation in character design and pushing the art of the medium. We agreed that the best CG would be to created something that looked like torn out sketch taped to a popsicle stick and waggled from under the camera. Silly idea, yeah, but we got a giggle out of it.
I love puppets and always will – but I’m not wholly devoted to them. I began my interest in filmmaking with my friend Bryan, making stop motion movies in his mother’s garage and in the back room of our high school art teacher’s office. That was puppets too – sort of. My interest in film brought me into theatre studies and I became (among other things) a mime. God help me, I still shudder when I say that. But my work in mime and mask and physical theatre was also a kind of puppetry – manipulating the human body to express character and emotion. All those things combined, the physical and visual expression of character and narrative, fed my ability to work with the Muppets and gain a career in puppetry.
It’s all the same shit.
As geeky and dated as these videos are it’s still refreshing to see that the most simple tools can be used to created works of wonder and amusement.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go finish my own animation work – but first I gotta find some popsicle sticks.
Cheers.
It's going to be more of a personal news aggregator with a featured video blog from yours truly. We'll see how long that lasts. So bear with me - thanks.
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