Puppet Play for Danny

Here are two Lotte Reiniger shadow puppet stop-motion movies I found on YouTube that inspired me to do a shadow puppet play for Danny's party...

An earlier video of Cinderella...



And Jack and the Beanstalk...



For Jack, his mother and the ogre puppets, I took some screen shots from this video, enlarged them at the printers and traced to make the puppets.  I happen to know a shadow puppet expert who I consulted and she gave me advice on materials.  They were cut using an exacto knife from dura-lar (thin plastic sheeting) covered with black contact paper.  The other puppets I drew myself and that is why they weren't as good.  I did like how the cow came out though...

She was made out of a few different pieces because I ran out of black contact paper.

Chris and I made the screen with a queen sized Ikea flat sheet and a frame that we already had (we used to use it for the gate to the garden, so there was chicken wire that needed to be removed.)  We stretched the sheet over the frame and stapled it down, then Jenni and I painted it with acrylic paint.

I loved how Lotte Reiniger depicted the growing beanstalk and the detail of the seed sprout, so I tried to do that with my beanstalk too, because that is after all, how beans grow.  I cut the bean-stalk out, removed the "negative image" and stuck the "positive image" (which was what was left on the sheet after I cut out the stalk) on some green gels that I got from Dick Blick dot com, then cut around the edges to free the puppet from the green gel.  Does that make sense?  It does when you look at the puppet.  Then, during the play, we put a blue gel over the light bulb so the screen turned blue, it looked so good!  Unfortunately you can't tell about the blue from the picture...

If I could do it again, I would use a thicker sheet of Dura-lar since my puppets were pretty big (the ogre was two feet tall and I used 0.05 thickness.)  I think thicker would have made them easier to manipulate, less floppy-ish.  I would also rehearse all the way through AT LEAST ONCE, which we couldn't seem to find the time to do.  We only got half way though the story when we did a practice run and the second half of the performance suffered for it.

Still, I think the kids enjoyed it...

And people laughed when the hen laid her golden egg...

I had planned to pin the sets to the screen, but that proved too tricky so we just taped them to a dowel and made them into their own puppet...

I'd like to get better at this art form, and maybe make some puppets that are articulated.  Wouldn't it be fun to have a small business doing shadow puppet plays for kid birthday parties?