Morning Call is a charming toy paper puppet short by Alex & Olmsted (Alex Vernon and Sarah Olmsted Thomas). It was produced last month for the quarantine edition of the Great Small Works Toy Theatre Festival (the same virtual festival that featured Annie Rollins’ previously blogged Soon).
The short grew out of a brainstorming session that Alex and and Sarah had recorded and uploaded to YouTube:
They’ve also produced a behind-the-scenes video about how to make a puppet film that takes viewers through their filmmaking process:
All of the puppets in the film were made with watercolors on Bristol board and Alex and Sarah make extensive use of paper mechanics in much of their work. In addition to the videos above, have some great tutorials that explain some of the techniques that they use.
This video is specifically about making shadow puppets, but it’s easy to see how the same principles can be utilized to make a film like Morning Call:
Alex & Olmsted are creating lots of other great content during quarantine. Subscribe to their YouTube channel for more and please consider supporting them on Patreon. If you’d like to see more work like this from the Great Small Works Toy Theatre Festival, recordings from all four days are available to watch on Facebook.
Via r/puppetry.
