making choices

The first crop of new Moomin characters are starting to emerge from the clay buckets in the workshop, and the realisation has dawned that all sorts of design choices have to be made- what level of modelling goes into the faces? Will they look like the same characters without big eyes? Of course the complication with this show is that the decisions aren't ours - the character designs have to be approved by the foundation who manage Tove Jansson's work. Usually in creating a Horse + Bamboo show,  the masks and puppets have their own logic - but the logic of line drawing is quite different, and the bits of information you choose to leave out aren't necessarily the same.  Somehow Moomintroll himself was more straightforward (which we made for the R+D months ago) - a smooth, simple head, a rounded snout. But Too-Ticky is more complex - for a start, she's more human. Well, we'll see what the foundation have to say.

Yesterday was also the design R+D for the new 20 Stories High show - Melody Loses her Mojo. For this show we are talking about creating a puppet to represent Harmony, Melody's 5 year old sister. In this show the 'fitting in' is with the human characters rather than the other puppets - the Mojo puppets represent a different level of reality, whilst Harmony is definitely of this world. In Horse + Bamboo shows puppets are sometimes used to be 'little world' versions of mask characters, so of the same materials, style, colouring. In this show Harmony doesn't want to obviously be a puppet at all - and so all the information I would usually choose to leave out of the sculpting might need to be in - therefore much more realistic. Usually I work so instinctively - it feels this is definitely the year to be questioning my choices, my long held beliefs.