Four Things To Ask Yourself Before Starting A Web Series

I've been (mostly) offline for the past week due to a screw-up with my ISP so I imagine I'll be spending most of the weekend in catch-up mode. While I'm attempting to slog through my inbox and catch up on work, read some words of wisdom about starting a web series (with puppets or otherwise) from the lovely and talented Felicia Day.

23/5/09 Update: Felicia Day is doing a live chat on ustream.tv at 8 pm EST tonight to promote the DVD release of seasons one and two of The Guild (her web series, which I highly recommend). She's compiling questions to answer in advance via Twitter, so if there's something you want to ask tweet her @feliciaday and include the #theguild tag to your tweet.

Gary The Puppet's Magical Internet Adventure

Gary The Puppet takes a trip through Web 2.0 companies in New York City.

I've been meaning to post Gary The Puppet's Magical Internet Adventure for awhile now. It's a silly little DIY video about Gary The Puppet (of IndyMogul fame) traveling to a bunch of New York-based tech companies. Gary is performed in the video by IndyMogul's Erik Beck and the wonderfully wacky Ben Ross.

Rant and Roll

Harried Harry is skillfully brought to life by Flexitoon Puppets.

I like this "Rant and Roll" video from Flexitoon. I always think of rod puppets as not being terribly expressive, but Harried Harry shows what can be done with one in the hands of a skilled puppeteer, especially in a well-staged shot. Check it out.

Monday Morning Inspiration: Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch inspired the world with The Last Lecture.

I made the oddest, most wonderful (and also tragic) discovery recently and I wanted to share it as this week's Monday Morning Inspiration.

When I first became interested in digital puppetry and started my Machin-X blog, someone told me about a program at Carnegie Mellon University called Creating Virtual Worlds. They suggested trying to get in touch getting with the professor who founded the program because he was incredibly passionate about things like virtual reality and real-time computer graphics. I eventually tracked this professor down online, pestered him a bit and he was kind enough to indulge a bunch of my questions and suggest some really good resources to look in to.

His name was Randy Pausch.

What I didn't know at the time - and actually only discovered a few weeks ago completely by accident - was that Randy was fighting a battle with cancer and was on the cusp of becoming an accidental celebrity. After he was told he had only months to live he decided to embrace Carnegie Mellon's tradition of doing "last lectures", a usually hypothetical exercise where Professors are asked to give the lecture they'd want to if they thought it would be their last. Randy knew that his "last lecture" probably would be his last, so he presented Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

The lecture was given to 400 faculty and students at Carnegie Mellon, but Randy really did it for his three young children. The lecture - which is really about how to live your life - was recorded, posted online and became a viral sensation that was watched millions of times and generated a ton of media coverage. Randy even gave an abridged version of his talk on Oprah (I really have no how I didn't hear about all this sooner, except that possibly it was because I lived in Mexico at the time).

Randy sadly passed away last summer, but he spent the final months of his life inspiring millions of people around the world. He didn't let cancer slow him down and he kept living life. I didn't know him at all - we just had a very brief exchange of emails - but I wish I had. What an interesting, amazing guy. And what a great gift he left the world with.

If you have an hour or so to spare sometime this week, watch Randy's Last Lecture. You won't be sorry.

Utilizing Your Backlist

If you're an artist, it's important to understand how to properly utilize your backlist (photo credit: Alex).

I've been writing PuppetVision for years now. When you visit the site or read it in an RSS reader you see 8-10 of the most recent posts I've made here. That's PuppetVision's frontlist. You have to dig a little deeper to find the other 1,470 or so posts I've made over the years and they're PuppetVision's backlist. I'm always amazed that consistently, month after month, no matter what I write about, by far the most popular page on PuppetVision is this post about Topo Gigio that took me just twenty minutes to write three years ago.

About two weeks ago I went to TCAF and saw Scott McCloud, who had people lined up to see him laregly because of a book he published over 15 years ago. I've heard Elton John say in interviews that while he loves having a number one hit, it's his catalog (one helluva backlist) that makes him a living. Popular web sites like Google, Amazon, YouTube, Hulu and iTunes? They're all about backlists.

It's really the Long Tail that we're talking about here and Seth Godin suggests a very simple method for taking advantage of it:

1. Assemble a tribe, a group of true fans, followers, people who have given you permission. Give them all the frontlist they can handle. Make it easy for them to spread the word, to Digg you or bring a friend to your movie or buy your new book for their friends. If you create too much content for this crowd, then you're publishing too much. They care, and they want to hear from you.
2. Promote your backlist. Invest significant time and money to make your backlist available, to recirculate it, to have it adopted as a textbook in English class or featured on Netflix or part of a retrospective on TV. Take all that money you waste in frontlist marketing and spend it on the backlist instead.
3. Repeat. Frontlist becomes backlist, backlist grows, fan base grows, it scales.

This may seem like obvious advice, but if that's true why don't more people do it?

Plato: Sony's Little Blue Alien

Plato is a little blue alien created to promote Sony's Walkman brand.

"Plato" is a blue alien character created for a series of Sony Walkman ads (watch them here and here). It's always a little hard to tell watching heavily compressed video on YouTube, but I'm pretty sure he was realized as a Bunraku-style puppet.

Special thanks to "Rockin' Rob" for originally pointing these out!

Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre is Fantastic Fun

Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre creates madcap puppet fun two socks at a time.

Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre might not be top-notch puppetry on a purely technical level, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a funnier, more consistently imaginative (or prolific) series of puppet videos out there. Created by Kev F Sutherland, the videos have a decidedly Scottish/British sensibility to them and frequently send-up pop culture icons from across the pond like Doctor Who and Torchwood. I also really liked the "I'm A Mac / I'm A PC" ad spoof, The Facebook Song and their apparently famous Halloween video.

Kev's created a mind-boggling 240+ videos for the web since 2006; a playlist of his best work is available on YouTube. You can waste a couple hours watching the mapcap fun of Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre and you won't regret a single moment of it.

Special thanks to Robin for introducing me to this!

Kobe and LeBron Nike Puppet Ad

Puppets of NBA stars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant appear in a new Nike commercial.

The web has been buzzing for the past day or so with talk about the new Nike ad that features puppets of basketball stars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. It's always neat to see a commercial like this resonate with people who don't usually watch puppetry. The spot is reportedly the first in a series of ads Nike is planning to roll out during the NBA playoffs.

The Kobe and LeBron puppets in the ad were created at Legacy Effects. The team of puppeteers who worked on this included Greg Ballora and Greg Manion (Lebron), Rob Saunders and Dave Barclay (Kobe) with Christine Papalexis, Alison Mork, Blake Bolger, and Patrick Gerrity assisting. The Kobe puppet's voice was supplied by David Allen Grier; Lebron's was done by SNL's Kenan Thompson.

13/5/09 Update: I've added information about the puppetry team who worked on the Nike spots (special thanks to Greg Ballora for providing the details!).

Monday Morning Inspiration: The Magic of Mystery

J.J. Abrams understands (and explains) the power of the Mystery Box.

I haven't checked the weekend box office, but I have little doubt that J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek movie was a massive hit. Friends have raved to me about J.J. Abrams for years, but I've been a late, somewhat reluctant convert to the cult of J.J...I don't watch Lost, didn't get Alias and I haven't seen enough of Felicity to truly appreciate it (I thought Regarding Henry and MI:3 were fine movies though).

I didn't get seriously interested in checking out the man's work until I saw the Cloverfield trailer and then again when Andrew Kramer mentioned on his blog that he was working on the opening titles for a cool new show called Fringe. That in turn led me to J.J.'s inspiring TED Talk about "the mystery box", which drops some big clues about the "secret sauce" that makes his work so captivating to so many people. This month's Wired Magazine includes an essay that further explores his thoughts on the power of mystery.

Thanks to the internet, these days the answer to almost every question is literally at our finger tips. As more and more becomes known to us I wonder, will the unknown - the "magic of mystery" - become even more compelling than ever?

Rest in Peace Eugenios Spatháris

Greek Master Puppeteer Evgenios Spatharis passed away after sustaining injuries in a fall en route to a performance last week.

The world has lost another master of a historic, traditional form of puppetry.

Eugenios Spatháris - one of the world's best-known shadow puppeteers - died yesterday at the age of 85. Eugenios was a second generation puppeteer who followed in his father Sotiris Spatháris footsteps working as a puppeteer in traditional Greek shadow theatre. He gave his first performance in 1942 and had been performing ever since. According to reports, he died from injuries sustained in a fall while en route to performance last week.

This is sad news for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that traditional Greek shadow theatre is a dying art form. Shadow puppetry has a rich history in Greece; it first arrived there from Asia in the mid-15th century and for decades after Greece first achieved independence it was the nation's only form of public entertainment. Sadly, it's popularity has declined somewhat during the past several decades and Eugenios had fought hard to preserve it as part of Greece's cultural history.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is much video of Eugenios Spatháris' work available online. The only clip I could find was this one, which has his voice and some of his puppetry remixed in to a dance video.

Rest in Peace Eugenios Spatháris.

11/5/09 Update: Seems that the AP and several other media outlets may have been misspelling Eugenios' name "Evgenios", an error I didn't catch until it was pointed out by Alan Cook (there is still a little debate about the proper English spelling of his name). To see more of Eugenios' work visit his YouTube channel.

Singing Piggies

Do a couple of singing pigs seem appropriate for the times?

Swine flu be darned, these lip syncing piggies from Noah Ginex are pretty cute, don't you think? Check out Noah's web site for more of his work.

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.

The Corsican Brothers Trailer

An animated production of The Corsican Brothers draws lots of inspiration from Victorian-era toy theatre.

I just watched the trailer for The Corsican Brothers. It looks great and has obviously been a labour of love for filmmaker Nigel Peever. I'm pretty sure that it's actually being done as computer animation, but it has a wonderful handcrafted look to it that makes look just like toy theatre. Go have a look and see it for yourself.

Via Penny Plain, Twopence Coloured.

PuppetBuilding.com - The Return

Due to popular demand and after a few of the inevitable delays and hiccups, I'm happy to announce this morning that PuppetBuilding.com is back online!

I had to take the original site offline last year after it was hacked by spammers (due to a security flaw in the site's software that has since been patched and resolved). I suppose in the end it was all ultimately for the best because the new version of PuppetBuilding.com is going to be bigger and better than ever before.

One thing that I'm especially excited about is a new series of puppet patterns and step-by-step video tutorials I'll be offering very soon. Those aren't ready to go live just yet, but keep your eye on the site and revisit often because I'll be updating the site with new content several times each week from now on.

If you've got questions or suggestions about PuppetBuilding.com I'd love to hear from you. Please feel free to drop me an email at puppetvision {at} gmail dot com.

Just In...The Latest Kasou Taisho Results

Kasou Taisho - a semi-annual competition with skits that frequently involve Bunraku-style puppetry- aired in Japan Wednesday night.

The latest Kasou Taisho special aired in Japan tonight which, in Japan, is already yesterday (it's like they live permanently in the future!). Click "Read More" to see some of the best entries:



This was the winning entry, a cartoony Manzai comedy routine.



I like this one too. Apparently, it's the boy's father playing soccer ball (this is also the only entry my limited Japanese allows me to actually understand).



How to get a doughnut without waiting in line.



Little kids recreate a conveyor belt sushi restaurant.

Via Japan Probe.

Beaker Wins!

Everyone's favourite hapless Muppet lab assistant has won a Webby Award.

Beaker won! The Muppets' Ode To Joy has won a Webby (see previous post) for People's Choice: Best Music Video!

Bunsen Honeydew must be so proud.