Owl in Spotlight new puppets

Greetings my friends!

I've had my head down and butt up sewing my Cinderella fingers to the bone for the upcoming show for Halloween. But I wanted to share a scene with you!

This is our heroine, Dort, stumbling across a scene from the Salem Witch Trials.

These guys are some of my current favourites. I love the flames and the pastor's bible.

Of course, often my favourites are whichever I've a) just made or b) my eye has just fallen on.

You can see a few more of the felt guys at our Flickr account.

I'm having a ball making them. Firstly I do a bit of research and find a spooky or halloween scene that I want to build, and then I set about creating it. It's been a really interesting process, unlike all other shows we've worked on, this time I'm making a bunch of guys and then I thrust them at Robert Reid (the other half of Terrible Comfort) and then he gets to weave them all together into a script. Usually the script comes first. It's be really exciting to see how it works from the images first this time!

Big fan of this show... We've had Peter Houghton in to pre-record all the voices and really, listening to him tell the story was a wonderful experience, just like having your dad tell you a bit of a spooky bedtime story.

I love my life.

make an owl, be a part of the next Terrible Comfort show!

Good morning my friends!
I'm almost back up ad running on the blog, there's been major life changes and it's taken me a while to get organised again... But we're working on a new puppet show for Halloween this year and we're doing a call out for handmade owls... Read below!

Come one, come all… Terrible Comfort is working on a puppet show for Halloween this year called Owl in Spotlight (How Dort Taught The House to Behave). It’s at the Carlton Courthouse, which is an old courthouse that’s been converted into a theatre but still retains all of it’s period features and multiple doors for Halloween this year!

The storyline is eight year old Dort and her family have finally moved into their new home but the house is not too happy about it. In fact, it wants them gone and does everything in its power to scare them away. Hideous ghouls and nightmarish monsters emerge from the houses dark shadows but they haven’t reckoned with Dort. A fully trained monstronaut, Dort isn’t having any nonsense from the house and, along with her pet bunny Chuck Norris, she sets out to investigate and teach the house some manners.

Owl in Spotlight (How Dort Taught The House to Behave), uses hand and finger puppetry, diorama, digital sound design and a walking tour in a spooky back stage exploration of the theatres. Designed as a Halloween event, How Dort Taught the House to Behave is appropriate for all ages and encourages the child in us all to find the courage to reason with our fears.

To help with the ambiance, we want owls scattered everywhere throughout the venue. This is where you come in!

Most of the sofites we’re making are around 20cms tall, so our preferences for owls would be around 10cm to 20cmsish. The bigger they get, the further away from the action they’ll have to be positioned to keep everything in perspective. The individual owls wont have credits next to them, but you will be credited in the program. People who contribute owls’ll get a free ticket to the show, if you can manage a couple of owls you get double passes. We’re happy to give them back at the end, but we’d love them as donations to Terrible Comfort. We’re hoping to tour our shows around the place and Dort will be one in our repertoire.
We happy for any kind of owl, how ever you want it to look, whatever material you want to make it out of and whatever position you want it to be in (flying, sitting, standing, other…) We need the owls by about the end of September.

To avoid theft, we encourage you to add a little material loop to the back of your owl, and we’ll then screw/sew the little guys down and maybe even put little bells on them. YAY!

Please let us know if you’re interested in participating in Owl in Spotlight. and do feel free to forward this to anyone you know who might be interested.

To see more of Terrible Comfort go to their website – www.terriblecomfort.com

Terrible Comfort. We make our own fun!

You need to use your imagination for this one

I want to share an event with you, but since I wasn’t there, I don’t have any pictures of it. But it’s magical and wonderful and you should close your eyes and picture this…

A friend of mine works as a stage hand (stagie) for one of the tv gameshows that use flitter, which is the big glittery stuff that drops from the roof when a contestant wins a substantial prize. There is another stagie there nicknamed Cookie, (all the stagies and camera guys of their generation have nicknames, sometimes two or three, which makes it confusing for anyone not in the know working there) and Cookie had brought his umbrella to work months before and kept forgetting to take it home. So my friend, Jumper (see? what did I say about the nicknames?) decided to play a prank on Cookie. Jumper half opened the aforementioned umbrella, filled it chock full of flitter, closed it tightly and replaced it. Then he played the waiting game.
About a month later it had been raining all day and had just eased as they were packing up to go home, so Jumper reminded Cookie about his umbrella. Cookie was very grateful, collected it and walked up to the tram stop. It started to rain again so Cookie, a short, stocky, sort of balding dude, did what anyone holding a closed umbrella would do in this situation. He raised it above his head and opened it.

Golden flitter rained down under the umbrella all over Cookie, drifting to the ground and gently sticking to several people surrounding him in the tram queue.

Apparently there was a little girl standing right next to Cookie who stared open mouthed as it happened, clutching at her mother’s hand with delight. Imagine standing at that tram stop that day, watching that magical moment pour out of Cookie’s umbrella.

That, my friends, is a transformative moment, changing the tram stop from ordinary to incredible, just for a minute, and that is the sort of thing Terrible Comfort wholeheartedly support.

(originally posted on the Terrible Comfort blog, but I love this story so much I wanted to share it with you guys too)

ARRG!

I'm attempting an argyle for the first time. Oh my god, it's a brain breaker! Just when you think you've got it going ok and you've figured it all out, you notice that you did one wrong stitch half a row back and you have to decide whether to rip it back out or not.

Very typically of me, I don't have a pattern, I found some arglyes on the internet and drew the pattern on a piece of paper, I've been working off that. It's very hard to start, but as the knitting grows the arglye is easier to see and thus easier to continue.

But getting cocky is dangerous, and it's really quite labour intensive, so it's a slow process.

Instead, let me show you some photos of the latest finger puppets I've made. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Dame Judi Dench and Kevin Spacey to the stage...


This is Dame Judi Dench, from the black and white film The Cherry Orchard

This is photo she is based on

found here: http://www.videodetective.com/actordetails.aspx?performerid=4446

And Kevin Spacey:

Here is Kevin on set for The Iceman Cometh:

These two puppets have been created for Terrible Comfort's Expression's on Modern Drama which can be found on Youtube here http://www.youtube.com/user/TerribleComfort

Go and check it out!

Look what we did!

Meet Dave. Dave is one of the newer members of Terrible Comfort. He's friendly, kind of modest, furry and he wants to talk to you about Chekov.

how awesome is this?

found down an alley
in the CBD


There's something so sweet about it!

I've been making a bunch of props for next year's Halloween show, and I wanted to share a couple with you...


One dark night, the moon got tangled in a tree...

A wizard with his bubbling cauldron. I love the use of stuffing as the steam!


and



We're not sure if this is The Devil or just a little devil minion from Hell. But I'm sure we'll figure it out or he'll let us know.

I'm such a fan of these guys... And each new one I make becomes my new favourite, so I chop and change all the time. There's currently 13 of them, which is a perfect time to stop and share a couple!