Voice of the Show

Playing Pinocchio! - Week Seven... by Suzanne Kendall This week Maud met Ronnie Le Drew! It was time to bring our muppets out of the bag again and I was pleased to see Maud after my brief affair with bin bags and marionettes over the past couple of weeks! I think she was pleased to see me too, mind you she always has the same smiling eyes and facial expression! However, this week she'd have some more life breathed into her and I'd get to see how much more dynamic she could be... Ronnie Le Drew (see Week Two ) went around the room and briefly tried out everyone's muppets. He demonstrated how the look of the muppet could inform their voice and the way they moved - their character. He showed us various ways of 'walking'. He also taught us how to operate the muppet's mouth when it's 'speaking' - how to lip sync the muppet with our voices - we practiced this by counting. When we got to number 'sev-en' the muppet opens and closes it...

Playing Pinocchio! - Week Four... by Suzanne Kendall More muppet making today! It was hard to believe that 'Maud' could be improved upon - she was already a real beauty! For a more thorough introduction to Maud, see last week's blog post... but once a bag of felt scraps was introduced to the room, opened and buried into, I began to get some ideas...! I gave her eyes a flash of colour - a lovely, bright and seductive green. I gave her rosy cheeks and coloured in her lips so that she had more of a pout. Finally, I stuck on some eyebrows. Predictably, I accidentally stuck an eyebrow onto myself first - it attached itself to me with fresh, hot glue from the glue gun - ow! Those savage days in design and technology at school all came flooding back... a bit of a comedy act ensued with my jumping up and down and running round the room trying to remove the eyebrow from my blistering thumb with my fingers, only then of course to burn my fingers in the process! Needless to...

Playing Pinocchio! - Week Three... by Suzanne Kendall Today, after a couple of weeks of watching demonstrations and listening to talks about puppetry, our puppetry class became practical. I must admit to feeling a little nervous when I was told we would be making muppets! For all intents and purposes we are defining muppets as moving mouth puppets. Many people think that Jim Henson invented the term by blending together the words 'marionette' and 'puppet' but there is some controversy about this... nevertheless, back to muppet making: I might have been a board-treader at school but was never particularly arty or crafty. Art classes were all very well but design technology terrified me - all those glue guns, scalpels   and cutting machines! Today there were glue guns. And scalpels. And electric bread knives!! There was also foam. A lot of foam! The stuff of which muppets are made... Ordinarily you'd start with a block of foam which you would cut and carve...