A couple of posts ago I wrote about the Puppeteers of America Festival: Puppet Rampage and its documenters, PBC Productions. 
In addition to providing documentation of the main conference, Chad and Brett also filmed/hosted seven short vlogs called "Rampage Diaries" that were posted online almost immediately, so that puppeteers that were not attendees of the festival would still know what's going on. 

Here is Diary #7, I like #7. I think it's pretty funny, if you start watching around 2:26, that's where the set-up for a joke begins. See if you recognize the people Brett & Chad point out. 

Did you see the cameo? Haha!


I like the commentary by Brett; "Three masters of the craft just walked out that of room; and somebody going to the restroom."

That's totally why I left the room! 
When I first saw this vlog, I was somewhat embarrassed...cuz they caught me!...But now I really enjoy it because I was in good company.

In the years since Rampage, they have also documented the 2009 Atlanta Festival and released it on DVD as well. Here's the trailer!

I'm a Big fan of the 2008 Disney/Pixar film WALL•E. Opening weekend I saw the film five times! Which was the First time I had seen the same film multiple times in the movie theater. - A close runner up was the 2009 film Avatar, which I saw 3 times in theaters. - WALL•E was a BIG deal when it came out, I was invited to a private screening the day before it came out and fell in love with the film. The first half hour is so wonderful and so puppet like. The pantomime and body language of the animation is so clear. A theater near my house was having a mid-night screening as the opening, so I gathered all my local friends together as quick as I could so that I could share this wonderful film with them!

Knowing of my craze and fascination of WALL•E, (I had bought the soundtrack and All of the toys that weekend as well) my friend Stacey Weingarten who was in New York sent me an Exclusive WALL•E plush from the Manhattan Toys R' Us. I was so overjoyed! The plush was Great! It transformed and Everything! Almost immediately I made this short fan-film of WALL•E with the plush, combining my two Favorite things!..Puppetry & WALL•E. Since it was posted two years ago (almost exactly) it has been viewed 27,171 times! Check it out!

Silken Veils, a multi-media marionette show written by Leila Ghaznavi is on the move. What started out as a project last November at CalArts has become a traveling sensation! Most recently performed at the Eugene O'Neill National Puppetry Conference and the Hollywood Fringe Festival is now moving on to the Edinburgh Fringe and Chicago Fringe Festivals.

The show is exciting and has been really fun to work on. The show is about one woman's struggle to come to terms with love and loss during the Iranian Revolution of 1978, as told through Rumi Poetry, live performance, animation and puppetry. 

Leila and I both worked on a show called Satellite Sinai in 2008 and I remember her talking about the idea for this show and at the same time she asked if I wanted to be a part of it, and I said, "Yes". In November 2009 we started rehearsing, the show mainly uses marionettes but features shadow and table-top puppetry as well. I was asked to perform the marionettes and design/build the other puppet elements of the show.

The marionettes have their own special story and are really a part of American puppet history. Leila went to the O'Neill Puppetry Conference for the first time the summer of 2009 and did the marionette strand with Jim Rose. Leila worked with Jim and Phillip Huber for a week of which the culmination was a short marionette routine that Leila performed. To make short a really great story, the mother puppet that Leila used and that we continue to use was originally built by Rufus Rose and costumed by Margo Rose, two of America's most famous puppeteers. Talk about lineage! The father puppet was more recently built and costumed by Ron Binion. 

This was the first time I had ever performed marionettes and with the great and masterfully built tools (the puppets) given to utilize, the experience has really been pleasant.
Here is a trailer for the show and some pictures.

If you're unfamiliar with the Great puppet blog PuppetVision, Go check it out! PuppetVision catalogs most of the puppetry that happens on the internet and has been the main source/daily blog to go check and see what's happening in the puppet world. Canadian puppeteer Andrew Young is the blogger of PuppetVision and does he does a great job. Andrew took a bit of a break from posting for the past year for personal reasons, but he's posted that he's coming back full swing!

Andrew is a great guy, I met him in person at the 2007 "Puppet Rampage!" in St. Paul, Minnesota, the bi-annual Puppeteers of America Festival. Here's a trailer for the festival documentary made by PBC Productions. 

Side note - I went to the festival with my Dad and we can both be seen in this trailer. Can you spot us?

Back to Andrew & PuppetVision! Way back in 2006, when I was 16 and running the P-CEP Puppetry Club, Andrew blogged about our first show. Here's a link to that post! I don't believe the links he links to work anymore, but his words were certainly high praises!...and brought us National attention. A year later when I went to Puppet Rampage our work as one of the Nation's few high school puppetry clubs was known.

I really like the title; "Fantastic high school puppet club"

In December 2007, I was in another blog post by Andrew. The blog post was a round-up of all of the most recent puppet videos on the web, and that week was the week of December 25th. Here's the Link! My friends and I had made a Christmas video just for fun. The sketch was written by Matt Bouse, who was also the head writer for the Puppetry Club. The video features Michelle Drennan and Lucas Seibel as the couple who is just trying to have a nice meal, which is ruined by the waiter, played by myself and assisted by Donavon Duff. Alex Magee filmed and edited the video and Ian Glodich did the sound. The video also played on the high school's internal student television station (STS).

All in all, I'm really happy that Andrew is back to posting PuppetVision, - he's where I have gotten most of my information and his blog posts have helped me in a number ways and I couldn't possibly list them everything. Thanks Andrew.

Every now and then on this blog I will post pictures of puppets and or projects that I'm working on. Some pictures will of course be from the past because of non-disclosure contracts....and because there are also some old projects/puppets I would like to show off. 


Well today I would like to share an Alien puppet I built a few weeks ago just for fun. I had the materials laying around and I was laying around as well, so I started this little guy!

He's a really simple rod puppet that is just a ping-pong ball on a dowel with a plastic base with protruding armature wire all covered with thin foam which was then covered in liquid latex. Here are some making of pictures.

I thought this quick build was really neat and turned out well. I wanted to try and applying liquid latex to bare scott foam and this was a very nice test. The latex and the coloring added really made the foam look like a sea creatures skin. It also makes a really neat squishy noise when it moves.

Hi!


Welcome to my first blog post on ChaseWoolner.com! 


Also, welcome to my site in general! I'm really excited about this new website. This is the third site I've had and I have to say that this is the easiest and the most fun to create. Weebly really makes it easy with its "drag and drop" interface. Previously I had used iWeb on my Mac to create "ThirdFloorPuppets.com" (Doesn't exist anymore) and then switched to Wordpress to begin creating ChaseWoolner.com, which had a nice layout and features, but just turned out to be difficult. Weebly has the best of both worlds!


So I'm really proud and happy about this new site. It's so Easy to use that my blogs will constantly be updated and my main site will be in a constant state of flux....just like Walt's Disneyland.


I apologize for my blathering on a subject unrelated to puppetry on a blog dedicated to puppetry....but it's my first post! Also make sure you check out my "Fun Stuff" blog where more ramblings like this will be posted!


-Chase