Our performance was of The Sun-Gods Castle, and it took a lot of time and preparation, but in the end the performance went well. We wanted to make the performance simple (so we wouldn’t get confused with too many puppets, or have to much on the script) and we wanted to get a clear image across, so that our audience would understand which character is which, and how the outline of the story went. We were inspired by many of the performances we saw online and through YouTube, but the main inspiration for a lot of our puppets, were some of the characters from the puppet show we saw at the start of the project, called “Cicada”. There were lots of different, very detailed puppets in that show, but we got the idea of the design of the three brothers in our performance by the design of the evil boss character in Cicada, we liked the idea of how his and legs were able to bend. The rest of our characters (Goblins, Grandfather and the Sun-God) were all inspired by the simple and easy (but effective) designs seen online. These designs were just a silhouette with a stick attached
We did have some issues during this process, one of which being the making of the puppets. We had some struggles distributing who would make what puppets, and really spent til the last minute making them because we would often get distracted, or the puppets would break as well. Another one was writing the script. We had to shorten and adjust the stories that we had chosen so that they would be under 5 minutes in the performance and still make sense when we’re performing it to the audience. The problem that our story was very long, and took almost 10 minutes to read. We were able to shorten it to the right length in the end, but it took a lot of breaking down and altering the story. Finally, the sound when we performed. At first we decided to perform our lines live to the audience, while we had a narrator out the front, also performing live, (which would’ve left two of us performing behind the screen, which was HARD). But after practicing that for a bit, and it not looking, or sounding good, we decided to record our voices to play to the audience while we had three people behind the screen performing with the puppets. Doing the voice-overs made the whole performance not only look and sound better, but made it a lot easier behind the screen as we had another person to work with the puppets.
I think if I did this next time, I would make sure we were more organised than we were. Even though we got everything done in the end, it was super messy. I would also make sure we all contributed more evenly, because I feel like some people were doing as much work on different things as other people were, and were being lazy, which isn’t fair, because then the person/people who did a lot of the work, won’t get recognised as much as they should be for the work they did.
I think used critical thinking when designing the puppets, we only had a certain amount of resources to share with the whole class, therefore we wouldn’t be able to use all of a certain thing. So we used different ways to make all of our puppets, so we wouldn’t use all the paper on one puppet. We also used critical thinking while performing, like sometimes, someone wasn’t focusing another person had to be quick and pull up the puppet so we wouldn’t mess up.
We collaborated a lot on this in a lot of different way, like with the puppets, and the script. I collaborated a lot with Sofia and Astrid while making the puppets, and collaborated a lot with Penelope while making the script
I did, we were very resilient when the live performance wasn’t working, or when we had to decide the roles, or when the puppets were breaking
Mostly, there were some parts where we definitely unorganized, but mostly we had everything together, had our scripts and puppets all together, and had the sound done by the performance