These are some stills from my latest Puppets and Prosthetics project, a stop motion shadow puppet show based on Carl Sandburg’s story, The Dollar Watch and the Five Jack Rabbits. Thematically, it follows my interest in lyrical or poetic storytelling and folktales. While I am usually accustomed to creating my own narratives, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to pay tribute to one of my favorite storytellers and one of my favorite stories of all time.
For this piece, I created a total of seven individual puppets; five rabbits and the two human figures. Each puppet was hand-cut using scissors and an xacto knife and jointed at crucial parts with wire. The backgrounds were created with a simple layering of white printer paper (thrifty!) and the occasional lacy cloud or two. To get the shadow puppet effect, I set up a glass panel and lit it from underneath with your every day table lamp so I could have the puppets and scenery moving overtop. I believe I wound up with around 659 individual pictures before the editing process began. The final film can be seen (not in high quality, unforunately) following the link below.
rachel, the stills look amazing! and the animation is great! you make me want to read this guy’s stories, and make shadow puppets, and animations, and everything.
you’re so talented, and so great at making amazing, beautiful things out of relatively ordinary material!
woo!
Wow, what a fantastic piece of work! I can hardly single out one part of it because I loved the whole thing, but the scene where all the rabbits jump into their arms and the boy ends up with – I think – four of them… that is a beautiful thought beautifully executed. Are you pleased with it?
Aww, thanks Eleni (are you going to show this one to your class too?!) ;)
Cally, thanks! The scene with the rabbits jumping into their arms is my favorite part! It was so much fun to shoot, and so rewarding. I am extremely pleased with the outcome; it’s exactly how I imagined it would be.
Oh I’m even more pleased that you’re pleased! That is what really matters, though obviously it is nice when other people like your work too!!