Puppet Place Final Vers Dan

Puppet Place is a creative community of artists in Bristol. They have about 20 full-time resident artists and around 100 associate artists who use the space when needed. The artists have diverse skills such as puppeteering, illustrating, robotics, and model making. They work on various projects as freelancers, including collaborations with Aardman. The building has been a creative space for 50 years and currently serves as a rehearsal studio for outside companies. The artists share workshop and maker spaces, and they often collaborate and pass work among each other. They emphasize the importance of networking and getting involved in the creative scene. We are currently in Puppet Place on the harbour side on Spike Island. We are a creative community of artists. We're all of us resident in this building. There's about 20 artists who work here more or less full time, and another, I think, 100 or so are associate artists who are able to use the space when they need to. I'm Alistair. I do a lot of different things. I'm a juggler, stilt walker, fire eater, general circus performer, but I'm also a model maker. We are a whole mixture of different disciplines. We're puppeteers, illustrators, roboticists, model makers, and we work a lot both here and sort of in Bristol and further afield, almost entirely as freelancers. So we move around a lot. We do a lot of different jobs. So I actually originally moved to Bristol because I got work at Aardman and I was there for six months working on their Star Wars project. And since then I've been doing lots and lots of different jobs. So I've worked as a puppeteer performing with Coldplay on stage for their UK tour last year, and I built floats for festivals. I've performed in festivals. Over Christmas, I was working in Abu Dhabi as a juggler. And then after that, I was making a stop motion music video. I worked on Blade Runner 2049 and Rogue One, Ready Player One. Last year before last, we worked on the Rings of Power series. Lots of jobs. This building's been around for a very long time. It's actually where Aardman was founded, but it's been a creative space for the last 50 years or so, and currently we're here. So right now we're in, this is the rehearsal studio. It's sort of a miscellaneous space in the building, but we mainly hire it out to outside companies who want to practice specific acts. So that might be dance companies, theater companies, puppeteers, anyone really who needs a space to practice something. We occasionally hire out bands as well who will use this as a practice space. It's also free to use for members. When we've built giant puppets or things in the past, we test them in here. And I think last month there was a stop motion advert that was filmed here for about a month. And that was done by people who also work for Aardman and puppets from a show run by a member. So did this guy. This guy was actually made by, this puppet was made by Dicks, the rat party of pirates, the Aardman film pirates, because he worked on it and was invited to the party. That poster there with the big bad wolf, that's a puppet that Dick uses all the time. Yeah, we try to reuse stuff as much as we can, partly because it's just much less work and it's cheaper. There's about 20 of us who share the space, who share the workshop, and we all have our own desks and maker spaces. This space belongs to Helena. She's a stop motion animator and director. She's not currently in. She directed a short film called Beltane that is currently doing around in festival circuits. This is Flo's space. That's Flo. I am an illustrator and prop maker for film, TV and theatre, sometimes events. But I also have an interest in puppets, which is why Puppet Place is a great place. And especially on theatre jobs, I've worked with puppet makers. So that's slowly what sort of interested me in the world, this crazy old world. Oh, you mentioned that project, yes. So, because Puppet Place, people know us for puppetry in the Southwest and all over the UK, really, everyone sort of knows about us in bits and pieces. We had an advert come through, yeah, directly from the producer, just said, we've got this event going on. It's quite big. It's good pay. You get to stay in a hotel. It's going to be like a week. We need like five puppeteers, was it? Four puppeteers and a wrangler. So that's someone who comes and helps and fixes puppets. And they said, you don't have to be like the best puppeteer in the world. And it was a secret job. And then I did some research into what the band was. They're playing in Manchester on specific dates. It was either Elton John or Coldplay. It was Coldplay. We found out and we were all kind of losing our minds because it's like one of the biggest acts in the world. Yeah, so we did that. We went off and within like two weeks, we were off to Manchester, like stay in this hotel with like triple A passes going around the Etihad Stadium. And that was just, yeah, it was insane. All of us were just losing our minds because it was such a big, crazy job. It was like being a megastar for like a week. I was on stage playing drums for like one of the biggest bands in the world, like in front of like however many thousand people. It was nuts. As a Muppet. This is my space. Right now, I'm just doing commission work, which means I basically set my own hours, which means I usually come in at about 10 to 11 and then don't leave until eight or nine o'clock at night. If I'm doing work for a client, I'll probably just match their hours. And then when I'm doing event work, that usually means I'm going to be working in the evening. If I'm performing at a party or if I'm doing some sort of circus show, that probably means I'll have to travel somewhere. My main sort of field is film and TV. I live in Bristol because actually I worked at Aardman for a good while on their Star Wars project as a prop maker. Wooden carved blurg from a Star Wars short that you see in the market scene. What else have I got? Luke's rifle. There's a stall of stuff touched by Luke Skywalker, so like it's his underwear, it's from his speeder and I made everything on that stall because I was the biggest Star Wars nerd in the crew, which was great because it often meant that if they needed something made but they didn't have a design for it, they'd just ask me because I had a good handle on sort of the aesthetic of the universe, so I'd be able to like, I designed and made this bike. There's a guy called John who's a music editor mainly, whose little cave is up there. But this was also more of a sort of general use space, so we hire out these two tables for people who want to come in and work. So before I was a member of Puppet Place, I actually came in and used the space a couple of times on some stop-motion projects that I worked on independently while I was at Aardman. This is also our machine space, so this is sort of a communal area. Our hot air gun, which sounds remarkably like a hairdryer, it's much hotter and that's for working with thermal plastics and things like that, which we heat up. So this is a ventriloquist dummy that was made for a show called The Shop of Little Horrors, not the other way around. He's built for performing with. That's my eyes working, that's my mouth. He's ice cold wonky. There we go, he's just a bit stiff and unused, aren't you? Yeah I am. Well I made most of him, but then I have a friend called Emma Powell who did all the insides of the head. Look at the teeth, look at the teeth on that! You can eat crisps. I would suggest if you wanted to get into the creative sphere, it's always difficult really, you just have to sort of try and get involved in any way you can, whether that means volunteering for the work art department at festivals or just emailing and writing to absolutely everyone, it's a constant hustle because connections are hugely important. Like that's one of the most valuable things about Puppet Place, that we pass work around because if one of us can't take on a job, we will know other people who can, or if we know someone who needs something doing that we personally aren't able to do, there'll probably be someone in the building who can. So like for example, I have done a lot of stilt work now with the folk who run Bath Carnival because they use this space to manufacture puppets, and once they found out that I'm also a circus performer, they've been using me a lot in their events. So yeah, I think that would be the most important thing, find the community, find the collective, find contacts, get yourself as involved in the scene as you possibly can. It's a lot of hard work, but it's really, really worth it.