Shadow Puppets

These puppets were born from an exercise I set myself with restriction. I was struggling with committing to character design so decided to try some symmetry based cut outs - folding a piece of card and chopping. Inspired by researching into Hans Christian Anderson's paper cut outs.

It was purely just chance that I was cutting these in the morning when my room gets sunlight and the shadows ! the shadows!! better than the cut outs themselves.
Played around with wiggling them about and making them dance and took a couple of videos. After this I decided to make a cast of the characters and shapes that were emerging in my stories, with the guise of actually making puppets this time and not an exercise in symmetry. Mum came home from her school with a bunch of lollypop sticks I could use to take better photos and videos with the shadows and away we go.
The limitations of shape and the fact that surface decoration or colour aren't important when constructing a shadow puppet was really freeing - took away some of the anxieties I've had surrounding image making at the moment - Instead this was just pure joy in chopping out a shape that felt right -and seeing where they went - and then how they ended up in regards to the shadow creating

Similar to the idea I was playing with with my lino workshop - I'm interested in how stories I create can become vehicles of storytelling for the viewer/participant. Motifs I've created through various research and experience take on new meaning when given to someone else to play with. This is how stories evolve and change and grow and thats a really interesting idea I want to keep playing with in the future.
The videos are not professional in any way - but I don't think thats the point - the point, rather than having a single beautifully executed outcome, is the play, the ideas, and the process that leads up to and happens within that play. I think thats true of my whole project, its more a way of creating than singular outcomes? This project has enabled me to learn about how I can produce stories and give those stories a life of their own through enabling them to be explored and told in various ways, letting go of the pressure and just making for makings sake and the joy that comes with that ?


my cast and crew:


played around and made some stupid films by myself: