First of all, as always, I would like to remind everyone, whether they have heard or not, Itínera Theater is having a Crowdfunding campaign: We are trying to raise €16,000 by Christmas Day to finish the construction of our "Cultural Eco-Center" - the first fully autonomous theater in the world. As part of the campaign we created a promotional video, which I'm sure you've all seen and loved. Oh you haven't? In that case, my best advice is to go straight to the campaign page to enjoy it, then if you liked it, share it with all your friends. If not, just share it with your enemies then, but please share, share, share...!
Behind the Scenes of a Puppet Show
At this point you may want to see how we made it all possible. Because as you probably have guessed, it took us a great deal of work. Okay, it was mostly the fun kind of work, actually, but it involved a lot of repetition and meticulous attention to details. But looking back at our video making, we had an amazing time, so let me share some of these moments here, captured by a curious camera.
At the beginning none of us had any idea what we wanted to do. The only thing we were certain about, was that the puppets of the three founding members Julia, Stef, and Manu, made by the Taller Hermanos Castro a long time ago in Colombia, should be used in some way. Okay ... Many long brainstorming sessions later we had sort of an outline of ideas. We wrote a script, and after re-writing it several times, making numerous changes before discarding most of the story, we were almost ready to film.
The newspaper you see in the beginning was of course created by us too, printed and pasted on top of an actual newspaper. (For those who are interested in reading it, there may be a bit of a surprise coming up!) Everything else was similarly improvised: the fashionable clothes you see our characters wearing, were actually sold for Barbie and Ken. Since those plastic bodies are way more sizeable than our puppets, dressing them in these clothes gave them a mad hip-hop look, so we had to grab the scissors to make some adjustments. Everything else you see, from the tiny milk carton and instant coffee jar (all famous brands) to the bricks and tires strewn around the place, were either bought in similar doll-supply stores, or made by ourselves.
Next we had to scout out a location that would somehow resemble our property in Mazunte. In the concrete jungle of Mexico City the only suitable option for this was in a park. Fortunately, in the Parque Lira, located only a few blocks from where I live, we even found a couple of nice logs. Sure, it made it look like we were building on top of some high plateau, but that way at least we didn't have to bend down all the way to the ground to move the puppets around.
For the first scene I needed to look urban and civilized, so I put on a suit and a hat. But after several re-takes and re-re-takes I realized that my pants were not even going to be in the frame, so I just stuck with my regular pair of cut-offs giving me the weird look of ... well, an actor wearing a costume, I suppose!
While it was mostly Manu and myself doing the preparatory work, when it came to the actual shooting, we could not have done it without some helping hands. Oh, and what skillful hands they were! Jazmín Gonzalez has studied puppetry in Argentina, apparently just the place to learn from the best in this art. And true to expectations, she brought some really sweet moves to our puppets. Another professional puppeteer who came to our aid was Raquel from Ñameñame Teatro. Her and her partner have been involved in a range of performances, and are even planning to come to Mazunte, most likely during the circus festival in March. With these two pair of extra hands, our three puppets were brought to life at once, moving around seemingly independently. Now we only needed someone behind the camera: Elia Varini, a good friend and former volunteer from Switzerland, already helped filming at Itínera's artists residence program last year. You can see the promotional clip created in the process here.
Looking back at it, it really feels like this work was more on the fun side. And even though at times we felt like we were never getting finished, eventually we had sufficient material not only for the main video, but numerous other fun clips, I'm certain we'll come back to. So as always, you can stay excited for more where all that came from. For now I'll just leave you with this Gif, the first one I created. (Wow, I had no idea it was this simple.) Enjoy!
