Treasure Island... new years and beyond.

Hello dear peruser of these words.

well, its already January the 2nd. Its the day after the last show of Treasure Island. When a show ends there is always a bag of mixed feelings, of both relief and sadness. a joy of being able to rest and recuperate, and emptiness of the lack of routine, the loss of performing, the goodbye to the cast and creative team... and even and sometimes particularly the goodbye to a character.

Its very easy to fall in love with a character, no matter who they are, when you play them every day. losing yourself in them, their habits, their personality, their effect on others around them, its a weird feeling putting to bed a character you have lived in for a while. its also that fact that your creative process is over. you never stop developing and tweaking a character with every performance. and when the show ends, thats your creative work done. its like finishing a painting. finishing it has a moment on joy, and then sadness creeps in because the fun is in the creation... its is this sadness that prompts you to do something else, a new creation.

right now i'm saying goodbye to treasure island.

I had a great time with Simon Mccoy as livesey and spinnacker, Eva Sampson as Benjamina Gunn / Barnical / Mrs Hawkins, Micheal Diana as Tom / Redruth / Hands, Leonie Elliot as Tempest (silvers Daughter, Damian Robinson as Billy Bones / Captain Smollet / O'Brien, and Robert Southworth as Jim Hawkins. goodbye to you and your characters. goodbye to Caroline Sharman the director.

Goodbye to the band: Igor Kennaway (MD), Alonso Mendoza (composer and percussionist), Simon Lambert (Piano)

Goodbye to the cast of fantastic kids who did so brilliantly in the show.

Good bye to the amazing set by Simon Higlet. and costumes by NaomI Gibbs

Not to mension Dom and jay the stage managers, and all the office staff front of house and theatre management at the New Theatre Royal portsmouth.

Its a big time for the theatre with a go ahead with a multi million pound rebuild... watch this space... its going to be a powerhouse of the arts in the south! thank goodness!

anyway goodbye treasure island. thanks to all those who came to see it.

next on the agenda is a set of personal projects i want to finish, including my kids book I'm illustrating.

so ta ta for now... I'm off to recuperate.

have fun.

Happy new year to all... and the best of luck with the year ahead.

Chris xx

Treasure Island - Capt'n Flint Parrots

Hello again dear readers,

So, treasure island!

Well I had finished making my/Long John Silvers wooden leg and now I needed to make the parrot.

My original idea for the Captain Flint parrot was a traditional rod puppet, the was sort of mangy, and featherless, with a big scar down its face. However, Caroline Sharman (the director) was concerned of the puppetry demands of such a puppet (and rightly so) with the adult actors having to play many characters, and the kids needed for many of the dances and simply my height at 6' 5'' meant that having a traditional rod puppet being operated by somebody else, was not going to be possible with this production. Simon Higlet the designer also wanted the parrot to be realistic looking.

So it was back to the drawing boards.

I thought about a self operated puppet that would be attached to me and I could operate from my pocket via the medium of cables and springs. This would have worked, but... for a lot of the time the parrot would look dead... it would also have limited movement. and look very fake and puppet like as a result, or simply like a stuffed dead parrot. It would also not be easily removed from me.

So I looked into Animatronics.  Animatronic kits for such a parrot cost a small fortune that would have taken almost the entire of the shows budget. I then remembered my days playing with furbys, and quickly started looking for animatronic toys.... and I discovered an amazing toy called Squwarkers Mccaw. these are full size parrots, that sit and move, talk and blink like real parrots, they react to touch, sound, voice and light and are totally self contained battery operated toys. Although new, fairly expensive... I thought a couple of second hand ebay ones would be perfect. and perfect they were.

These parrots were terrific. and not only did they look and move amazingly, they were hard wearing (being toys) and remote controlled and reprogram-able. so I could program the toy to say what i needed it to and it would respond to the appropriate line from the actor (this proved slightly unreliable in practice) but it was still a great solution to the self operated traditional rod puppet.

Once I had the toys I then set about recovering them. As lovely as they were, they needed to be less toy like a more real. so some paint work and varnish later they were 'realed' up as it were.

I then designed a way of getting the parrot to sit on my shoulder, then with the help of my dad and his awesome metal work machine we build a contraption for the parrot to sit on. We created a metal plate that had two spikes coming out it it these ran up into the feet of the parrot. there was also a metal strop that ran down my back with a bolt attached that again stuck out of the back of my costume. To the parrots themselves, we attached a metal strip that ran through its tail. This clipped effortlessly to the bolt on my back when the parrot was placed on my shoulder. This held the bird in place, but also meant it was quickly removable.

In practice this worked great when just walking about but when i had to do some intense moving around the demand was too great and the parrot would fall off or to the side. So we added a couple of ties that helped tie the parrots feet to the spikes and it stayed firmly put... chatting and chirping and looking very real!

The final hurdle i had to cross, was another parrot, that flew. So i returned to the idea of a traditional rod parrot. only this time it had one simple purpose and that was to fly. I had made Huge flying seagull puppets for James and the Giant Peach   so i adapted the flying wing contraption i had developed for those for a smaller more light weight parrot puppet. and again with the help of my dad and his awesome metal lathe we made the flying contraption which was sprung loaded with elastic bands. the effect - pull the rope - the wings flapped down. release it they sprung up. nice and fluid and realistically. Modeled below by Damian:

the body of the parrot i built out of styrofoam, and covered in fake fur that i painted to texture and match it to the animatronic parrots. the feet and eyes were super sculpey... and the beak painted and varnished card. it had to be light as it would be operated by kids... and  we had a flying captain flint.

operated below and in the show by Declan:

So with the parrots built and silvers leg... and later I made a palm tree for the set and a few other bits and bobs... it was time for me to pick up my script, throw on a tricorn and start rehearsals as Long john silver.

over and out.

xx

Treasure Island - Silvers Leg

Dear Readers,

It has been a busy busy few weeks. Treasure Island has been filling my life in many many ways... Late October I started having meetings with Caroline Sharman at the New Theatre Royal Portsmouth and a few emails with designer Simon Higlet and costumer Naomi Gibbs I started work on some puppets and props for the production. This included a wooden leg I would have to wear as Long John Silver.

Simon and I both agreed it should be a bit like an action man leg... pivoted in the middle. this would enable me to have some movement in the leg.

I made a basic structure for the leg out of a dense blue foam, a type of flexible styrofoam, the sort of stuff you would pad a seat out of.

the leg was in three parts the upper/thigh part, the lower leg/shin part, and the foot. it had to look like it was made from wood and look accurate when bent/pivoted.

 This is the leg partly painted. once i had constructed the shape of the leg, I heated a knife and sires to an extream heat and used (in a well ventilated space) the hot knife to carve into the plastic foam.

I took the opportunity with the leg to create something that wasn't just a wooden leg, but also had a story. i liked the idea of silver spending his spare moments at sea just whittling things into his wooden leg. so i drew up a design of an octopus reaching its arms around the leg and up towards a ship on the waves. i also carved certain character names into the leg. names of silver friend from the book, like flint, blind pew etc.

once i had carved this design i then needed to make the leg look wooden, so i did this by carving grain and slits through the leg and through the carvings. I also had to carve out the picot points to give the pivot illusion. then it was time to paint the leg. a couple of white undercoats, and then with the wood effect paint work.

The is the leg on. The lower part had a zip running up the back hidden under a material flap painted with the same wood effect. Once I had painted the leg  i used tin foil on the pivot joints to give them a metal look. i then varnished the leg several times to give it strength and also a nice wooden sheen. then i had to make the foot.

I used one of my old Crocs Boots, as a base, then stuck foam over it and carved into it. Using Evostick (i used a lot of this on the project) i stuck some foil to felt and cut out some metal bits to dress the wooden leg. in an attempt to make the leg and foot look functional and hard wearing.

with the foot done the last thing to do was age the leg. I worked from the foot upwards, give the foot especially as slightly old moldy look as if its gotten damp a lot, and traveled that up the leg. i rusted the metal parts, and adorned the leg with some leather strops and nail head to make it look like its bee repaired and held together.

this is the leg on:

now all i needed was the rest of the costume, a script and a parrot!

Parrots were my other obsession... check back for more updates on treasure island !

Chris xx