My name is Andrew. I’m a filmmaker and puppeteer and since 2004 I’ve been writing a daily blog called PuppetVision that I’ve used as a platform to share thousands of great puppet films, videos and performances with close to half a million people around the world.
From the giant Dinosaurs that roar to life in arenas, to the amazing horses that have taken Broadway and the West End by storm to the the Muppets making a comeback, puppetry is in the midst of an incredible renaissance right now. In an age of cutting edge technology audiences seem to be enthralled with the magic of good, old fashioned puppets.

All of this work is being done by different artists, in different cultures, often working in radically different artistic traditions, but collectively they’re part of an amazing cultural legacy that stretches back tens of thousands of years to the very dawn of civilization.

Inspired by my PuppetVision Blog, I’m making a feature length documentary called PuppetVision: The Movie that examines puppetry as an art form and the common threads that link these artists. Using interviews with and performances by over sixty puppeteers from at least fifteen different countries, this film is going to share amazing work by amazing artists and have them talk about how they create it and why.

http://youtu.be/du875FWRJmc

The PuppetVision blog is a blog that I’ve been reading for quite a while. Lots of good information on puppetry and links to interesting videos people are making with puppets. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it was a starting point for me when it came to puppets (that weren’t Taiwanese). Back then, I literally went through the blogroll on the sidebar of the site to discover other websites and found cool people such as:

• Naomi Guss: who runs School of Puppetry that has tons of information on all kinds of puppets. Lots of well-research articles and tutorials, especially on puppet making.
• Stacey Gordon: who makes the most awesome finger puppets on her site Puppet Pie.
• Tom Stewart: who posts tons of interesting puppet videos on his site Puppeteers Unite. There’s also a directory of puppetry blogs and websites. And the puppet making videos based on the Project Puppet patterns are simply excellent.
• Mary Robinette Kowal: Puppeteer by day and award-winning sci-fi writer by night. That’s already enough awesome that requires no further elaboration.
• Gaston Morineau: who builds the cutest puppets and regularly puts on shows in San Diego. And a great guy too.

… and many more. In fact, it got me involved with the online puppetry community and gave me the opportunity to work on a student film. It introduced me to Swazzle, a local puppet making / production company. I started following them on Facebook, which at one point mentioned Michael Earl’s class, which led to me signing up, receiving more training, making more friends and performing in shows. When I traced it back, the PuppetVision blog was a starting point that later led to a lot of things.

It would be great if the film can serve as a starting point for many viewer’s journey for puppetry as well. If you would like to contribute, go to their IndieGogo page.

And here’s some cool footages of Taiwanese puppets shot for the documentary (which reminds me, I still need to upload some Taiwanese puppets footages I have). Enjoy!

http://youtu.be/hGr7Eb7UrsQ

Last May, we did a puppet show called Puppet Jukebox. And now, we are bringing it back for another weekend of performances. So here it is, the sequel: Puppet Jukebox II: The Return of The Gaga.

It will be the same format. We are going to walk you through the history of music in the last century. We have a mix of people who have performed in the first one, such as myself, and a new group of graduates performing together. We have a mix of songs from the previous show and some new numbers. The theater is better, and the stuff we are doing is more ambitious. And it’s going to be fun.

So, if you are in the Hollywood area, here’s the info:
Opening night: December 10th, 8pm
Matinee: December 11th, 3pm
Closing night: December 11th, 7pm
at the Hudson Theatres
6539 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90038-1548

For more info and tickets, visit http://www.puppetschool.com/pj/tickets.html

Here’s a video from the last performance:

http://youtu.be/9Mq_eMAoJFY

Sure, this class was about puppeteering, not singing, but man, we got some really great singers. Some of the singers really made me looked at the puppeteer instead of the puppet, because I could’ve sworn that I was listening to a recording instead of live vocals if I didn’t look at them. Now, I wouldn’t call myself a good singer, but I definitely had no problem carrying a tune. But some of these people simply were on another plane. They totally wowed me with their voices.

We also rehearsed the piece at the very end, which included every single member from both classes. It was not actually entirely written. We basically just had a structure and outline, and then improvised from there. It came out somewhat different every time, but I personally think that was great, because we all had to be really in tune (no pun intended) with what was going on in the scene. For this particular piece, I think I actually prefer not having set melody and lyrics.

Looks like the show was coming together. The fact that I would not be able to make the rehearsals this weekend did make me a little concerned, but hopefully the combinations of the rehearsals we’ve already done, the extra meetings I had (and will have) with the director, and our abilities to played off of one another can reduce the impact to the minimum.

Should be a fun show to watch.
Get your tickets here.

The show will run for four performances from May 26 (Thursday) to May 28 (Saturday). There is one show each of the night, and a matinee on Saturday, where it’s family-friendly with all the curse words cleaned up. (But where’s the punch in that, right?) The show will take place at The Complex – Hollywood. So if you are in the Los Angeles area, come join us for some silly fun!

For more details about the show (and to get tickets), click here.
To see the Facebook event, click here.

PS. Don’t ask me who those people in the picture are. I don’t know either. I believe they are people from the other class, but anyway, we’ll find out after tomorrow’s rehearsal when the two classes meet and rehearse together.

Ever since I was a kid, I love these koala cookies. These are bite size snacks with chocolate filling that has drawings of koalas on them. The old ones have the koala playing a drum, kicking a soccer ball, etc. But since then, they have expanded the varieties quite a lot.

Now I want to take it more seriously and pursue koala cookie design. I mean, think of all the possibilities! The koala-shaped cookie is a blank canvas. On it you can draw all these different characters! You can have a koala-pig hybrid. You can have someone you met in high school. You can also have video game characters! See my wonderful drawings? I used to lack confidence, but now that I got an ego, everything just looks so much better!

My friend Dave once said, “Most people move on from childhood and leave it behind. I feel like Kelvin managed to take his grammar school years with him and has continued to develop them throughout his adulthood.” Well, he’s damn right! Now that I am full of myself (just like a child), I can go pursue my childhood dream!

Wish me luck! Here’s more of my koala drawings on my Flickr album.

Get Cookie Monster to Host Saturday Night Live!

Want to see Cookie Monster host Saturday Night Live? I would. It would be interesting to watch. If he’s on, it would give me a reason to watch SNL, for once, as I usually don’t find it to be all that funny. (They have some good skits sometimes, but those usually go viral on the internet, so why bother sitting through the rest of it?) But hey, if Cookie Monster can speak at a commencement, why not SNL? Support him here.

It’s a Monster World!

Michael Earl’s students from the advanced TV puppetry class will be doing a graduation show on December 13 in West Hollywood. It’s a musical called It’s a Monster World and I am going. Anyone else want to come?

This looked really fun, and I have several friends that’s going to be in the show, so I have to say, I wish that I had been a part of this. Now I will just regret preliminarily (or should I just call that pregret?) for not signing up for the class and maybe regret officially after seeing the show. And then retract the regret (ungret?) when (if) the class is offered again.

It’s weird. His classes just seem to get awesomer and awesomer. That actually made me not want to sign up for the class right away, because I was expecting it to get even more awesomer. That said, I am signed up for the theater puppetry class next year. To check out all these puppeteering and puppet-making classes, go to the Puppet School website.

Farmers Commercial

Two weeks ago I was casted in a Chinese radio commercial for Farmers Insurance. I went into the recording booth to play a 7-year-old’s dad. The commercial will air in February, I believe. So here it is, my voice coming to Chinese radio stations everywhere next year. (By everywhere, I mean everywhere in the U.S. that actually has a big enough Chinese population to support a radio station, which is probably not that many places, but whatever, it’s still kind of cool.)

I seem to book one voice-over job per year. It’s a good thing that I don’t do it for a living, or I would certainly starve.

The last few weeks have been brutally busy. I was working on an iPhone/iPad app for a client and I also worked on wrapping up my own pet project after that. And I am pleased to announce that my pet project has been approved and it’s now available in the app store!

Introducing… the Traditional Chinese Input iPad App!

I made this app because it was something that I wanted, but could not find in the app store. At the moment, the iPad only supports the Simplified Chinese keyboard but not the Traditional Chinese keyboard, so as an iOS app developer, how could I not build one? So here it is. It’s also the first app that I have released under my own name, after building apps for clients for two years.

I doubt that I will make that much money from it, since I am pretty sure Apple will eventually support a Traditional Chinese keyboard natively, essentially wiping out the whole market for me. But hey, now I can say that I have my own app out there in the app store. Nice ego boost for me.

To check it out, use the link itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/chinese-input/id398857305?mt=8 which is supposed to open iTunes, but unfortunately the link doesn’t seem to work on every device. I would say that if you are an iPad user, just go search the app store for “Chinese Input”.

And the other app that I’ve finished was an iPhone/iPad app for an upcoming TV show premiering in early November. I’ll let you know when it hits the market. For now, let’s just say that it’s for a show about animals on a channel that focuses on the nature.

I’ve been spending more time doing computer programmer stuff. There was a new project that kept me a little busy, but for the most part, what really kept me busy was this little pet project that I’ve been working on after work. It was sort of technical and most of you probably wouldn’t be interested in it. But it was something I wanted to finish and I will talk about it when it’s done. You know, sometimes I don’t really feel like talking about something until it’s done and this is one of those cases.

Also, here’s something you might not be that interested in: I just started a new blog. Feel free to click over but it would probably not be very interesting for most of you. I have been too busy to remodel it so all you see is the default Twenty Ten theme. That’s going to be my new blog where I talk about computer programming, specifically, iOS app development. Feel free to subscribe and read technical mumbo jumbo.

But here’s something you will be interested in (maybe). So I was listening to the radio and an ad for California Lottery came on. The slogan “Imagine what a buck could do” was quite familiar to me, but it still didn’t stop me from having goofy thoughts. When they told me to “imagine what a buck could do”, I imagine a buck (you know, a male deer) ramming towards a car door and rescuing the people that were trapped inside. Or maybe it was a house that was on fire with people trapped inside. Either way, I imagine a buck as a hero that rescues people with his antlers. So, what would you do for a Klondike bar? Oops, I mean, what would you imagine a buck could do?

And I think I should write a post about the evolution of smoky eye make-up because I am also a make-up artist in my spare time… Okay, more like a artist that makes up stuff. Or actually, I just make up stuff, period. I had lunch at a food court at a mall and apparently this is what the mall inspired me to do.

For some reason I really dig B.o.B.’s “Airplanes” song lately. It went “Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars? I can really use a wish right now, wish right now, wish right now”. My first thought was “That’s cheating! They are way more frequent and go much slower!” And then the second thought was, there must be someone in an airport somewhere unable to get on an oversold plane and singing “Can’t we pretend that shooting stars in the night sky are airplanes? I really need to get on a plane right now, plane right now, plane right now”. Once again, random thoughts.

So I was having lunch and realized something, because lunch was very inspiring, apparently. I was at a pizza place and James Blunt’s “You Are Beautiful” came on. During the guitar interlude, I realized the image that popped into my head was James Blunt playing the guitar and Telly Monster snapping his fingers. I realized that I am way more familiar with the Sesame Street version than the original. Still, it was always fun when singers go on Sesame Street and parody their own songs. My favorites are Feist’s Counting to Four (parodying 1,2,3,4), Norah Jones’ Don’t Know Y (parodying Don’t Know Why), and James Blunt’s My Triangle (parodying You Are Beautiful).

I actually have more random thoughts (because I have a lot of them), but this post is getting fairly long already. So that’s it for now. Until next time.

That’s right. In addition to Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc., I now have a profile on IMDB. Kind of cool. Now I can call myself a movie star! Okay, not really…

But wait, guess where my name is also appearing. Yep, in the news!

That makes me even more famous. Again, not really.

I got an IMDB page because I worked on a student film back in 2008 called Seamus and Magellan. The way it works is that you cannot just create a profile for yourself. There needs to be a film already included in IMDB and then you can attach your credit to it. I am not entirely sure what the criteria are but apparently this film is eligible to be included in IMDB. As for how I got on the news web site (and probably also the printed version), the reporter knew that I am an iPhone app developer so he asked me to comment when the new iPhone was released. That was how I got into that article.

So if you think you need to be famous to be in the IMDB or the newspaper, think again.

Chances are, neither of these will make me any more famous than before, but hey, the idea that I am in IMDB and the newspaper simply amuses me very much.

Date: Six Saturday mornings starting November 14, 2009
Location: Los Angeles, California (More specifically, Sherman Oaks, which is right next to North Hollywood)

This is the class that I’ve been writing about for the last few weeks. Michael Earl is an Emmy-award winning puppeteer/writer that had worked on Muppets, Sesame Street and numerous other projects. He has been puppeteering for 31 years now, and of course, that’s lots of experience and knowledge on this topic. The beginning class will run for six Saturday mornings starting November 14th (this weekend). The class is for Muppet-type puppets. You will be taught to perform for the camera, while the monitors give you instant feedback on what the performance looks like. You will first learn the basics, like how to stand straight and how to walk. You will be taught different exercices for different aspects of the performance. You will lip-sync and dance to songs. And you will also do some improv. Very fun class. Everyone learned a lot. If you are interested in puppetry and are in the area, I highly recommend this class. For more information, check out the website at http://www.puppetschool.com.

P.S. In addition to the Los Angeles workshops, Michael Earl will also be doing a whole-day workshop (10am-5pm) on January 8, 2010 in New York City. Info about that workshop is on his website as well.

Puppet-Building with Naomi Guss (Australia)

Date: Six Saturdays starting January 23, 2010
Location: Melbourne, Victoria (More specifically, Northcote)

Want to learn how to build a puppet? Puppet builder Naomi Guss of Puppets in Melbourne will be teaching a puppet-building class in January and February of next year. You will learn to make the head and body (out of foam), cover it (making the skin) and dress it. You will also get your own copy of the pattern. And of course, at the end you can all play with your puppets. This is a class that I would’ve signed up for if I were in the area (but as you can probably tell, I am in Los Angeles), but if you are in that area and interested in puppet-building, take a look at the info on the website regarding the class. Check out http://www.schoolofpuppetry.com.au