Ambiance by Darkmatters, on Flickr

A test shot for my upcoming film Cosmo's, featuring the puppets from my sigpic - mainly just working out lighting issues here

Welcome to the microcosm of the puppet theatre... a tradition spanning way back into the antiquity of history and claiming an important place in Man's relationship to art and to magic. Puppet theatre has existed alongside it's full-sized counterpart from the beginning, emerging from their roots in fetishes and tribal masks wielded by shamans in the telling of their tales - the working of their majicks. In Europe traveling troupes would push their carts from town to town and put on their puppetshows, receiving scraps of food and coins for their efforts, and mending puppets between shows with whatever materials were available to them. There was actually a very common material called Composition that many puppets were made from consisting largely of potato starch and other food products - often the puppet maker/actor/showmen would go hungry in order to repair a broken nose or ear for the next show.

This tradition existed alongside the famed Commedia Del Arte, exchanging ideas between them and strengthening each other in the process, and eventually led to famous productions like Punch and Judy - almost direct precursors to some of the early Eastern European puppetfilm animations that serve as my greatest inspiration. I have examples of lots of clips from these European gems on my site at Darkstrider.net (sorry for the repetitive dark-age, yeah I'm a big dork!). Also feel free to explore my YouTube page (all videos below will not surprisingly be featured there as well) and my blog where I delve into related subjects, including discussion about all aspects of making a stopmotion film as well as occasionally posting some behind the scenes on my upcoming film. Oh, and how could I forget, my Flickr page, featuring still images of my work and test shots as I work out lighting details etc (plus a few shots of my dog Pepper).

I'm currently working on what I consider my first real film, so everything that's gone before has been exercises and tests and microfilms... but still fun to watch. Well, without further ado, here are a few clips I've done over the years:



This is my first microfilm, done for a contest me and a few friends created (yes, we entered films into our own contest, but we disqualified ourselves from winning). One of the keywords was Shoes, which might help explain the ending.


Ok, enough for the first post. Ill add to this gradually. Check back for more.