This is a very messy little timeline of my last year in puppetry (or whatever I was clever enough to document)
Our first puppet was very ambitious for having never attempted to make something humanoid before and I discovered that joints and necks are VERY difficult to make using things I could find around the house with no experience, tools or planning.
Here you will see my sweet little friend climb onto a couch and a small test performance in the rain during a class at uni.
A lot of what follows is bird themed. I have been working on my play Owl and the Albatross since 2019 and this last year has included many many attempts at building albatross. First we have two baby albatross, one made from kitchen supplies and duct tape during a 2021 lockdown, and the second made in November of 2021 from needle felted wool (that had been recently attacked by a cat prior to filming this and was not in his best shape.
Last Winter I experimented with what I had intended to be a puppet, but I don't really know what I would now describe it as, but it definitely has puppetry adjacent qualities to it, so I am including The Forager in here as well.
I then returned to albatross. I foolishly didn't film anything great with these first two large albatross prototypes, but I made a video showing them to a friend in October 2021 which definitely gives an impression of the scale.
I then worked with a mentor, Jason Lehane, to try and build an albatross puppet that could both fly and sit or walk around. This is very much still a skeleton prototype, but it was able to do all of the things that we needed it to do. Foolishly, I only have footage of it flying and not of it being delightfully sassy on land.
I've quite enjoyed putting this collection together. It is nice to see how my techniques have evolved in the last year which makes me so excited to see what will happen in another year when I'm hopefully not in lockdown and am able to work with other people and learn from their wisdom to make things that would blow the mind of 2021 me.