Cat Rock - fabricating paper landscapes

Cat is a puppeteer, theatre maker and artist based in Bristol who works with the awesome House of Funny Noises and is a resident of Puppet Place . She began working with The Paper Cinema on our Macbeth production in 2019, her role was at a newly created second visuals station where she mostly provided backgrounds for rear projection and analogue special effects - including things like smoke and lots of blood!

Initially Cat continued along that trajectory during our lockdown R&D, creating 3d models of our locations and expoloring the posibilities of using a point of view perspective and even creating special effects like rain on a window.

We took Cat’s footage and used it in conjuction with other company members outcomes to produce videos to give us a sense of what these elements might look like together.

Cat’s next challenge was to produce a 3d puppet of Nic’s character “Mothman” from the character design below.

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We had been playing around with the idea of incorpoating more 3d in order to exploit the incredible puppetry skills of the performers we work with.

Here are some pictures of Cat’s process.

Cat then sent the puppet to the brilliant Teelé Uustani while she was self-isolating back in Estonia, for a while there we got worried he was lost in the post but eventually he arrived and Teelé made some great little films with him.

Check out more of Cat’s work at the House of Funny Noises and don’t forget to seek out their excellent 48 Hour Puppet Film Challenge

Cat also makes beautiful artworks as Kappa V Kappa as is well worth a follow on her Instagram

Finally, if you would like to support our work, please consider donating the price of a coffee via our Kofi page here

Nicholas Rawling - drawing and devising

Alongside the work of the other company members, Nic has been drawing out some scenes and simultaneously devising a plot. These start life as a special sort of storyboard that takes into account the movement of the 2d puppets and other background elements.

Nic writes….

“As the sandbox of the paper cinema is open - this process is as much casting (characters, sets, props) than traditional film storyboarding - framing is loose. Everything needs bleed - natural edges, I am drawing the key frames - the beats, looking for where i can do two or more movements / reactions from a single character / drawing. Composition framing and movement are part of the devising process with the rest of the crew, we all start to find out how the piece wants to breathe as we mix in the music and the changes. This initial run is quick, just in an A5 notebook, biro and lots of staring into space ( classic artist behaviour laying under trees, on sofa’s etc - I am working honest ! ) running the story in my head from as many angles, then sketched down raw quick, half a spidery mind map and half exploded comic book - (hur .. humm …! ) nobody is going to see them, apart from the crew.

The next stage is me running to the crew shouting ‘I’VE GOT IT !!!’ in the mode of a clothed Archimedes, unfortunately despite my fervor the crew look through these books as if have been on a sketching holiday to Luxor with Dr Jones .”

It’s possible that just Nic, and Nic alone fully understands these sketches! Can you decipher them?

Here is a peek into Nic’s next sketchbook where he is refining the ideas from the storyboard into nearly finished drawings that will become puppets.

Character studies and colour tests for Gwen

“These are experiments to see if adding form with pencil shading will give the piece a softer and more jovial feel of rendering rather than the hard dark ink line of the noir world weary of the Scottish usurper - of our last show. There is always the question of weather to go into colour, maybe this is the time, maybe save time with inking the form, enjoying swaths of colour instead. But this always comes at a cost of our exposure levels on the live camera possibly revealing all handles, sticks, strings, edges and everything else taped together to bring out the magic - more experiments to do before decisions are made.. (also note Gwen having a third arm here this is not denoting her as a divine daughter of parvati, but trying to get two actions (keyframes) within one drawing) “

Nic then chose to produce these incredible scene illustrations to help give a sense of some of the narrative points.

“ With the sketchbook only readable by Nefertiti and me - it was important to make a series of images from the story to give the crew and audience an idea where we are heading. It felt great just to do finished drawings, getting to draw the background on the page - use shadows, silhouettes, blur and speed lines - techniques normally denied to me, in drawing for The Paper Cinema where everything is a separate element and there are no great shadows - fun, I wish to do more.

It is becoming apparent that with our previous long adapted narratives, there was always a text to support the story, that if we wandered or didn’t hit the beat with enough clarity the audience could be lost between Cawdor and Charybdis. Does that mean we need a secondary source for this original story - whether a graphic novel, zine or poster book. This would act as a key to the viewer - what do you think ? ”

If you would like to support our work, please consider donating the price of a coffee via our Kofi page here

Teele Uustani... Shadows, Glass and Colour

Teele Uustani is a puppeteer and performer who has been working with us over the last few years, helping to develop and tour shows including Macbeth and Ghost Stories.

During lockdown, Teele wisely departed from her base in London and decamped to her native Estonia, from where she was able to explore some new techniques as part of this R&D.

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Teele writes....

During the distant R&D for The Keys of Tobias Brown, I explored with providing different backgrounds with shadows and other visual images/effects. Part of this exploration was also figuring out how much Paper Cinema style puppeteering is possible to do with just one person (instead of two or three as usual).

Since the whole project is very much still in development also from visual side I did not have many actual PC puppets to play with, so I extended the puppet play to exploring shadows and different light sources and how they work on camera. I filmed shadows of some of the puppets as well as plants both indoors and outdoors. I played with creating movement not by moving the object but the light source.

Different set ups for the filming sessions (indoors and outdoors) and some of the examples of playing with shadows, glass and colour.

Although PC world is usually black and white, I also explored colour and played with different materials, such as glass and plastic to create simple visual effects. None of these....were to create or support a particular narrative, but simply to find out what works on camera, how it reads and what could be used to find new aspects in the PC visual language.

I also tried out using a(n actual) 3D puppet, its relationship to the paper world and how it works in front of camera. I used a puppet (the Moth man) that Catherine Rock, built based on Nic's design. 

Film by Teele, music by Francesca Simmons.

If you would like to support our work, please consider donating the price of a coffee via our Kofi page here

Introducing Tobias and a Socially Distanced R&D

Back in June 2020, The Paper Cinema team, began meeting virtually to work on ideas for an original project provisionally titled “The Keys of Tobias Brown”. We received funding through the Arts Council England’s Emergency Response Fund that allowed us to undertake this work and we are incredibly grateful for the support.

New Artwork by Nic Rawlng

New Artwork by Nic Rawlng

We’ve been working on this project on and off for a few years, most recently producing on a script outline with ace animator Joseph Wallace as part of Bristol Old Vic’s Ferment, this was presented as a talk at The Pervasive Media Studio titled, ’How to Grow a Story’.

Normally as part of our development process, we would meet up and begin to put together some ideas for the show. Then we’d typically test out these early versions with a real audience to see what they think. Before lockdown we had started to have regular sessions at The Wardrobe Theatre called “Paper Cinema Club” - yes we need a better name for it!

Photo credit: Cat Rock

The idea was to create a space for the company to meet up, do some development work, then share straight away with a live audience. Through doing this we were aiming to create momentum for us as a company, but also community as we share and play and collaborate with the audience in these open sessions. We only managed to have one session before Covid hit, but it was great fun and hopefully we can resume at some point, but until then, we will be shifting that process online here.

With social distancing in place we had to figure out a way to develop the piece in isolation - with our normal way of working unavailable to us, we made a group decision to spend the time exploring and expanding the visual and sonic tricks and techniques available to us, and creating a unique language for the show. This new palette includes: old sound effects LPs, shadows, plants, point of view camera angles, scale model buildings, glass light filters, morse code, telephones, 3d puppets, waterphone, and um… phenakistoscopes. Don’t worry there will be our tried and tested cut out illustrations and live animation too.

Hopefully, without giving too much away about the new show, we will be sharing some of that process as a series of blog posts. Each one focussing on a different member of the team and showing their unique approach to this early stage of the project. Expect to see rough drawings and demo recordings along with process photos and video edits where we experiment with putting all these elements together.

First up, we will be hearing from puppeteer and performer Teele Uustani about what she has been up to as part of our remote R&D process.

If you would like to support our work, please consider donating the price of a coffee via our Kofi page here