Making Doctor Who

Jay Tyson has created a step-by-step tutorials demonstrating how he built a caricature puppet of David Tennant.

Jay Tyson built a great-looking puppet of David Tennant (the actor who pays The 10th Doctor in the long-running sci-fi series Dr. Who) for his puppet web series 99 Acre Wood. Jay is an incredibly talented puppet builder and what is especially cool about this is that he's put together a detailed series of step-by-step video tutorials demonstrating how he built the David Tennant puppet and made them available online.

Each installment covers a different aspect of the process of building a hand and rod foam puppet. You can download each one for just $5 each, or order them as a complete set on DVD for $65.85 US (including shipping). Jay also offers other video tutorials on subjects like flocking and building eye mechanisms for puppets (the full list of video tutorials can be found here). He was kind enough to send me a bunch of them to review and I learned a couple of new puppet building tricks. At $5 each I really think these are an incredible bargain for anyone interested in learning about building puppets.

Cross-posted from PuppetBuilding.com.

14/5/09 Update: I originally linked to the wrong video. It's better now.

Monday Morning Inspiration: The Hunt For Gollum

Fan filmmaking get taken to the next level by The Hunt For Gollum, a remarkable movie made "by fans, for fans".

The Hunt For Gollum may be the greatest fan film ever made. In fact, I hesitate to even call it a "fan film" because it's just so well done; there are professional movies and TV shows that don't look this good. The 40 minute production was inspired by the appendices of JRR Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings and acts as a bridge between the Tolkein's The Hobbit and the LOTR Trilogy. It looks absolutely stunning and was shot on a budget of just £3,000 (about $4,500 US). Although it has a few weak points - mostly some of the acting in the early scenes - it's an incredible achievement for so-called "fan cinema".

If someone can make this for less than $5,000, what's preventing you from making the movie you want to?

Action Figure Videos

Action figures are used as puppets in Star Wars in 3 Minutes.

I've written about the phenomenon of "Action Figure Videos" before (previously posted examples include I'm A Marvel / I'm A DC, The Eyes of Darth Tater and The Eye of the Tiger), which I find really interesting because they're a form of found object puppetry, even if the people making these videos don't realize it.

Thanks to Robot Chicken making Action Figure videos isn't exactly ground-breaking stuff, but someone who was doing it long before Seth Green's crew was Probost Productions. They're probably best known for Star Wars in 3 Minutes , but they've also parodied Raiders of the Lost Ark, celebrities and Rankin/Bass. You can see all of their videos on YouTube.

Monday Morning Inspiration: Incredible Full-Scale Star Destroyer

Some seriously dedicated Star Wars fans have built an incredible full-scale Star Destroyer set for the fan film Tydirium.

This morning's inspiration was going to be an amazing 60,000-Piece Lego Star Wars Hoth Diorama (complete with LED lights!), but never mind that. Who wants a Star Wars diorama when you can build a full-scale Star Destroyer interior for yourself instead? This incredible set was built for a long-in-development German Star Wars fan film called Tydirium.

Links via Gizmodo and Fan Cinema Today.

Gremlins Fan Film

Gremlins run amok through classic movies in the fan film Film Break.

Sacha Feiner is a huge fan of Gremlins. He's made a really impressive fan film featuring the little green monsters called Film Break. It's an alternate "fan sequence" for the DVD version of the Gremlins 2's "film break" scene that involves the Gremlins invading classic movies like Batman, The Exorcist, King Kong and The Goonies.

To make Film Break, Sacha manufactured his own Gremlin puppets, shot them against blue screen in his home studio and painstakingly composited the shots in to footage from the original movies. Some of the shots in Sacha's project are incredibly complex. For example, in the "Snake Pit" sequence Sacha dressed and redressed his relatively few Gremlin puppets dozens and dozens of times, filming them from different angles to create the illusion of a cave filled with hundreds of Gremlins.

The finished film took two months to make and cost 2500 euros (roughly $3,500 U.S.). It's starting to attract a fair bit of attention online and has gotten some notice on European television. You can learn more about how he did it in a behind the scenes video.

Via Drawn!