Sometimes it just needs a decision to start.

The last weeks, I extendedly stared at my mood board to come up with an idea of how I want to continue with the puppet design. The mood board has grown widely and the more I studied it, the more I want my film having a paper-like look and feel. But I don't want it to look flat like a drawing, more like sculpures made of paper. It all should seem to be light and kind of fragile.

This is a paper house I built at the very beginning of the design process. Now I found it a key to what I want the film look like. It is approximately 15 cm high.

Because a lot of current productions seem to go for clean and almost perfect puppets and animation, I first thought I'd like to do so, too. I didn't and that's obviously because I don't really want to. I want something more artificial becoming a cinematic reality. (Though the animation is going to be perfect, of course... ;) )

While reading my every morning bowlful of news and blogs, I caught up to date with the blog of Vanessa Soberanis of Curious Spoon who had worked on a music video for some time. Vanessa is a Los Angeles based

"animator, photographer, painter of furniture and lover of kinkajous and cats",

as she describes herself. I really like her style and the way she combines different techniques and materials.

Reffering to her posts, Vannessa mainly used clothed puppets to fill the video's world with life. But there's also a memory sequence which she wanted to differ from the other from the video's reality. For this sequence Vanessa employed paper puppets. I asked her permission to use her pictures in this article so you could get an impression of the puppets below.

Both pictures above: ©2009 Vanessa Soberanis of Curious Spoon, for more read her article.

"I drew and water colored them on watercolor paper, cut them out, reinforced them with cardboard from a Cereal box, then glued and taped rubber bands onto them at the joints",

Vanessa writes. And that's pretty cool and encouraging because I often take packaging materials for such a purpose as well. You see, there's no magic. Only creativity and solved problems.

I decided to work with paper puppets again this time as I did in my first animated short Ein anderer Traum (engl. Another Dream). At that time I made the puppets of thick and painted packaging cardboard because I wanted them to stand upright (see above) and attached the limbs with these split pins. I love to work with light and shadows and spatial depth. With paper puppets lying it's much harder to archieve a good lighting though you can archieve interesting effects by shooting through several layers of glass or cel material like, for example, Yuri Norstein did.

After this decision I went straight back to character design.

Did I mention, that it sometimes just needs a decision to start?