bird progress

So we finally have some sort of a plot going for our bird puppet show. We've moved from the city to the suburbs and have decided to restrict the characters to "The Finches," a conservative bird family. There's a mom, dad (Atticus?), son, daughter, and an egg. They live in tree house with stairs leading up to it since the birds in our world still can't fly. The dialogue at the beginning will somehow allude to their inability to fly...maybe they'll be complaining about public transportation or traffic or something. At some point we think we'll have some sort of breaking news announcement on either the TV or the radio announcing some bird's theory that birds are actually supposed to be able to fly and there will be some fun conservative dialogue between the dad (birds were not meant to fly!!!) and the rebellious teenage kids. I think that's about as far as we got with our plot development.

We've got some general ideas about our sets, too. We're thinking of building two sets that would together be about the length of one of the worktables in the studio. One set would be like a living room set from a sitcom and the other set will be an outside setting...perhaps the yard or wherever else we decide we need later on. We could switch from set to set using lighting and have action going on in both settings simultaneously with different characters if necessary.

For now we're going to focus on building our birds and motorizing them to flap their wings, and perhaps move their necks and feet so we're collecting motors and remotes and bringing various materials to experiment building birds with.

I just found a few sites about Vietnamese Water Puppets and learned that these performances originated with farmers working in rice paddies and in ponds. The surface of the water acts as the stage and the puppeteers maneuver the water puppets with rods and strings from behind a curtain.