Building the Green Room Sizzle Reel SHAG Puppets – Part 4

May 9, 2017 by the Chief

An important part of the original Mr. Rogers’ show was the World of Make Believe which was inhabited mainly by puppets and occasionally by humans. The Green Room’s world of make believe is inhabited by marionette style puppets inspired by the work of the artist, Josh Agle also known as SHAG. You can learn more about his work on his website. http://www.shag.com

How to green screen a puppet on a budget?

We quickly realized that it took at least 3 sets of hands to make all of the little parts move pleasantly…

Testing against make-shift green screens in Doug’s garage with different lighting.

Some final footage with the moon background. Of course in the reel show they would have an actual SHAG designed set to play in.

So please wish us well that we get this show going!

And thanks for checking our progress out.

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The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Building the Green Room Sizzle Reel SHAG Puppets – Part 3

May 2, 2017 by the Chief

Making the Old Fashioned Marionettes

Making the heads from styrafoam. clay, chopsticks, and acrylic paint.

It was fun to figure out how to design the arms and legs to mimic the pencil thin pointy style of SHAG’s limbs and appendages.

These dolls were very fragile, so all sorts of funny things happened while making them!

Next to give the marionettes their moment in the spotlight… Stay tuned for Part 4 where we tried to green screen the puppets.

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The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Building the Green Room Sizzle Reel SHAG Puppets – Part 2

April 25, 2017 by the Chief

The next thing we had to do was to chose the characters to be demonstrated and then actually build marionettes for the sizzle reel.

Visualizing SHAG in 3D

Picking out the SHAG characters and background was a fun exercise. We wanted to make sure we included a man and a woman character and also to make them diverse.

We narrowed it down to 2 characters in our pilot script:

SHAG has several existing three dimensional toys out such as those by Disney and others. So they were helpful to analyze how to interpret SHAGS work in the 3D world.

We did try to find someone to model them in 3D animation software through fivvr campaign. That proved to be disastrous. Poor attempts from 3rd parties to create a puppet in 3D programs are below.

got turned into these:

We decided it would be best to do it the old fashioned way…

Stay tuned for Part 3.

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The Green Room Sizzle Reel

Building the Green Room Sizzle Reel SHAG Puppets – Part 1

April 18, 2017 by the Chief

The first thing we had to do was research how other marionettes were made and make a simplified version of them for the purposes of demonstration for the sizzle reel.

Looking at armatures of other marionettes.

Olvera Street sells cheap little marionettes very simply crafted. It was this style that we ended up using for the sake of the demo. The actual show will require more complex marionette action.