Leon and Bagrat sing Good King Wenceslas.
Posts Tagged puppet
Leon and Bagrat discuss some of the political events for the week of December 3rd, 2011.
Leon and Bagrat present an overview of Herman Cain’s effective media managment.
I built a new arm chair for the set today. Â The arm chair is made of wood and canvas with a little bit of foam. Â Not likely to be comfortable. Â But the puppet will not really worry about it. Â The bottom and seat cushion is designed for controlling the puppet.
Set with Arm Chair
I just finished sewing the “Wolf” skin jacket. Â It went together very well. Â The fur and the black canvas work well together. Â The new puppet’s name is Isaac. Â This will keep him nice and warm when he is out in the wilderness hunting…
Finished Jacket
Jacket for Puppet
Sep 26
I have laid out the outer pattern and cut the fabric. Â I will lay out the lining tomorrow.
Patterns for Puppet Coat
The fabric is a fake fur so I am sure it is going to be a ton of fun to sew.
Puppet making good progress
Sep 25
The puppet is making good progress. Â I am moving on to making a jacket for him. Â I am using this pattern for it.
I am choosing fabric that is quite different. Â I will show more as it comes along.
New Puppet in the works.
Sep 25
I started a new puppet on Friday. Â It is going to be an entry to the ProjectPuppet 2011 Puppet Contest. Â This years theme is around a time machine accident where characters from the 1850′s through 1900 fall through time.
This will be the first year that I have entered. Â I thought about it last year, but didn’t have everything together now. Â But, now with 5 Roly puppets under my belt, I figured it was a good chance to do something new.
I have done a few things different with this puppet
- This puppet isn’t using Antron fleece. Â That is unfortunate. Â I am using off the shelf fleece from Jo Ann’s. Â It isn’t as good. Â It is a lighter weight fleece so though the same pattern is in use, the puppet just looks smaller. Â Seems also show much more.
- I am using Barge’s cement on all of the construction. Â This is good. Â It is far easier than hot glue. Â You just need to have good ventilation.
- About half of the face of the puppet is made out of a heavy weight leather. Â The leather is being used to show a significant area of the face has been burned. Â We will have to wait and see how that turns out. Â The heavy weight leather makes facial movement a little more constrained. Â The lower side of the face is fleece so that the mouth has a full range of motion.
Here are some photos from the construction.
The Leather was too thick to sew so Barge Cement was used to glue the fleece to the leather.
Leather side of face
The leather was too thick to naturally take the form of the upper lip, as the fleece does. I wet the leather and used some hand clamps to pinch the leather into the correct form.
Forming the upper lip on the leather side of the face
The seam of the leather was glued. Because the puppet’s character was to be significantly damaged anyway, rather than hide the seam I turned it into a feature of the puppet. Stitching has been added to make the seam a wound.
Adding Stitches to the Seam
After the puppet is finished and submitted, I will post all of the details around the character that I have created for the contest.
If you have time, I encourage you to create a new character and submit a puppet to the contest.
The recent recordings that I made for the voiceover for Leon’s Kickstarter video requestfor the Partnership for a Czar Free America was done entirely on the iPad. Â In the past I have worked with a mAudio Delta 1010 and with a Fostex MR8-HD.The Delta 1010 had good sound quality, but it had to be paired with my PC which brought a ton of fan noise along. Â So for personal recording, it wasn’t very well suited. Â I didn’t use it often enough, and each time I did there was a learning curve as I tried to remember how to configure it correctly.The Fostex MR8-HD is a nice stand-alone device that I have used often. Â It is able to record 4 tracks at a time which can be a plus. Â It’s single wheel input device leaves much to be desired, and has a smallish lcd screen. Â It is quiet enough to do most recording that I need to do, but is still larger than I would desire for my sound booth.The sound booth that I use was homemade out of 2″x4″s, plywood, insulation, and foam. Â Â It works pretty well for isolating most noise around the house. Â I do most of my recording at night, so that helps as well. Â There is about 3.5 feet by 3.5 feet of floor space available for use.The iPad seemed to be a perfect alternative. Â It is silent, and is small enough to easily fit in my sound booth. Â I have a first generation iPad with 64 GB of storage. Â The 64 GB of storage is sufficient for almost all of my recording needs. Â The main drawback for the iPad is that it is only able to record one track at a time.
I picked a Blue Microphone’s Snowball as the microphone to connect to the iPad. Â This microphone is a USB microphone and can be connected to an iPad using the Apple Camera Connectivity Kit. Â The microphone is powered off of the iPad through the connectivity kit. Â The microphone comes with a table top microphone stand, but I preferred a floor based microphone so I switched it to that one.
The Camera Connectivity kit connects to the iPad’s charging port as shown here.
Camera Connectivity Kit
When selecting recording software, I started looking at Sonoma Wire Works. Â They make a nice iPhone software for recording which is called FourTrack. Â For the iPad they make a larger version know as StudioTrack. Â This larger version allows for the playback of up to 8 tracks. Â Each track can be muted or put into Solo mode.
StudioTrack
For my recording, I use one track per take.  Each song can then hold 8 takes before I need to create a new song.  I can also quickly delete tracks if required.  Rather than edit  tracks together, I kept recording until I produced a version that I was satisfied with.   There were two problems that I encountered while recording with StudioTrack:
- When monitoring my recording with head phones there was a slight delay between when I spoke and when I heard it in my ears. Â This was minor, but was present. Â I am not sure if this is a problem with the software, or with the iPad.
- I occasionally ran into memory problems with StudioTrack. Â The memory issue could be worked around by not having other programs loaded into memory.
StudioTrack has a nice WiFi sync capability that allows you to easily copy wave files directly to a Mac or a PC for editing.Once I was satisfied with a track, I copied it into MultiTrack DAW. Â While I could have edited the track further in MultiTrack. Â I mostly used it because it has a nice waveform display of the audio that follows along when playing. Â This assisted me in matching the puppet’s mouth to the audio track. Â More practice would help as well. Â 
MultiTrack DAW
Overall the effort worked pretty well. Â The only area that wasn’t as easy to use as I would have liked was editing. Â I use Sony’s Vegas Pro software for audio and video editing. Â I find it very intuitive to use, and a mouse, keyboard, and two screens make the PC environment very comfortable for accurate work. Â On the PC I might have gone through and edited out all the breath noise on the track, but I wasn’t willing to go to that effort on the iPad. Â So hopefully enhancements to MultiTrack DAW will come out that will make editing on the iPad as easy as the recording was.
The following photo shows all of the equipment setup in the sound booth.
Recording Setup
Kickstarter update posted
Aug 14
I have a new update on the Partnership for a Czar Free America Kickstarter project.
You can check it out at this link.