Hi, new to the forum. Just thought I'd introduce the ongoing efforts of a bunch of us here in Southampton, England to create a musical version of the life of Hezekiah via the medium of puppets. So far, we've never quite got around to putting the main musical together, but we have done a number of "christmas specials" - see last year's here:



It's very much a work in progress, but we're hoping to do a mini 'short' christmas special and then start filming the main production: "Hezekiah! The Musical" early in the new year. Watch this space if you're interested and do let us know if you like the videos!

Thanks,

Mike

I Love it! great work with a variety of props and puppets. BTW Welcome to Puppets and Stuff.

Love, Love, Love this!  So cute. Reminds me of playing with my dolls as a kid. We like to have our preschool puppets look like they made their own costumes like a kid pretending would do. You did an excellent job.

Thanks for the positive replies! We're hard at work making our 2011 video, it's going to be a bit of a play on the previous one, we start off with a scene in Hezekiah's bedroom, if you look (very!) closely on the table you'll see that he has got tiny plasticine models of the puppeteers there, who suddenly "come to life" in this version, vice-versa on the last Christmas video! still being filmed at the moment, so will report back when we've made some more progress!

Well, we ran out of time in the run-up to Christmas, so we had to "shortcut" the script (a lot!) in consequence, it now makes almost no sense whatsoever if you haven't seen the 2010 Christmas special, but we still had great fun making this:



Still took a solid afternoon to film & then quite a lot of time to edit together afterwards, despite being much smaller than last year's. I think we should have tried a bit harder to keep the lighting consistent though - whoops! Still, lessons learned for next year's... (!)

P.s. It would be good to get some constructive feedback on this; laying aside the rather poor attempts at humour, what works, from a technical perspective? What doesn't? What would you change? Comparing to the two previous years:
2008
2010

What would you suggest we think about improving or doing differently? We're hoping to film our "proper" full-length Hezekiah musical in 2012, so getting some constructive feedback on props, puppet use, directing, scripting etc from some pros would be very helpful.

Thanks a lot, and of course, "Have a merry Hezekiah Christmas!"

;o)