From the very beginning
We have always sought to reach out to one another.
And storytellers found a new forum for personal expression.
Wondrous new tools will help us learn to bridge the gaps between us.
Good morrow, nerds!
My name is Cheyenne, my friends call me Az, and as a child my personal standards of beauty
were set by puppets.
Welcome to the Larp House.
So, as anyone who has ever met me will know, I am a big fan of Brian Froud.
And Jim Henson.
And anything they touch.
From the storybooks to the Storyteller mini series, from the Labyrinth to The Dark Crystal.
And for the record, the reason that The Dark Crystal wasn't in another video I made called
"Videos that created me," was because I was planning on doing MORE of those videos and
I wanted to space out the EXTREMELY ridiculously important ones so that I would have one in
every video.
The Dark Crystal was gonna be the whole star of another one.
Anyway, I saw The Dark Crystal at an extremely important age.
I was isolated often as a child, I was very strange,
I was very loved, but very strange.
I cared very deeply about art and atmosphere, more than thrills and games.
So I would always prefer to go to themed restaurants over...
Chuck-E-Cheese.
It's become an inside joke that six-year-old me would...
Would be begging to go to themed restaurants by going " ThE AMBIANCE, MOTHER.
THE ATmoSPHERE."
And I was just...
A little..
Art...
Goblin.
Basically, I wanted to explore other worlds.
So when I saw those rare and unique beautiful fantasy movies like The Last Unicorn, or the
Neverending Story, Legend, Labyrinth, and the Dark Crystal,
... My tiny soul just ... lEFT MY BODY.
I'm pretty sure those movies changed the shape of my bRAIN.
I could not have loved a human baby as much as I loved those movies.
Every other kid my age was TERRIFIED of the puppets in The Dark Crystal
I straight-up wanted to BE THEM.
I thought that Kira was the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen in my entire life.
And let me tell you, it's a WEIRD LIFE when your beauty standards were set by a weird
little faun cow fairy puppet with wings.
#Am I a MAAAAN or am I a muppet, (am I a muppet)#
It's been a weird life.
That insatiable need to create and experience other worlds eventually brought me to LARP.
I am a LARPer.
In part, because of what these movies DID TO ME.
And I spend a WEIRD amount of time thinking about how to make these fantasy worlds more
real.
I had my formal education in illustration, concept art, and themed design.
I learned from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts, OTIS College of Art and Design,
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Stan Winston School of Character Arts.
I never actually graduated from anything even though I've been to art schools for over ten
years, because I kept just learning what I wanted and moving on to the next thing that
I wanted to learn.
And absolute art monster.
And something that I have always wanted to bring to immersive experiences is...
Puppets.
Not like sock puppets, no, I mean Dark Crystal puppets.
Labyrinth puppets.
Jurassic Park puppets.
Guillermo Del Toro puppets.
Why?
Because I don't want my fantasy creatures that I create and inhabit and interact with
to be limited by what make-up and a costume can do to a human body.
Because most of us are not operating with a blockbuster budget, we have very little
control over the landscapes we play in.
Our venue options are pretty limited.
But you know what we can control?
Mother.
Fluffing.
Puppets.
Anyone can make them, and with a little ingenuity, you can use them to make your fantasy universes
tangible.
Puppets are freedom.
When I heard that a prequel to The Dark Crystal was coming to Netflix, I... immediately fell
into the sunken place muttering things about my hopes and dreams for like, maybe three
weeks, I don't know.
I couldn't even handle hype-posting about it.
It was... too important.
If the show had been a failure, that would have meant something really final and sad
about all of these art forms that I've spent my entire life loving.
Singing: And I just can't handle that kind of disappointment right now!
But for once, I didn't need to worry, turns out.
I cried at the opening scene and I didn't stop crying for ten episodes.
I got pretty dehydrated actually.
I have CRIPPLING ADHD and I did not take my eyes off that screen once.
Not even the second or third times that I watched the series.
I'm gonna be that fan, oh boy, oh...
Yes.
I am.
The story somehow very human, it's both intense and uncomfortable to watch, but also impossible
to look away from.
And the world...
This must be the most beautiful fantasy world I have ever seen in my whole life.
Every single piece of it is sculpted, created, or synthesized by artists who have a lifetime
of love for the work that they're doing.
And it shows.
Both the Henson and the Froud families really went all-in.
They called the banners to create a dream team of people for this project.
Seeing this now has done to me what the original Dark Crystal did to the lil' baby chaos fairy
all those years ago.
I'm having the opposite of a panic attack.
A manic attack.
"hyperventilates"
I feel like I wanna throw up and eat at the same time.
I feel this need to create my art and to just...
CONSUME anything that blocks that from happening.
I am resurrected.
My essence has returned to Thra.
The Crystal of Truth is healed.
The Darkening has left my body.
And I'm not the only one who feels that way.
#medieval tavern music#
My name is Nox, and I am a professional...
Creator?
Artist?
It's been a, an ongoing thing for me to try to NOT define that too heavily.
But I build sets and props for television, film, TV...
In my real life, as I like to refer to it, I am an avid LARPer.
And I build puppets.
I did go to Columbia College, in Chicago, so I have an actual art degree, but I don't
feel like that makes you an artist.
And I don't feel like it's in any way shape or form necessary.
Started out very young, I would take over my parent's garage and turn it into haunted
houses.
So I would build monsters, and um, creatures out of paper mache and balloons, and then
I started to wonder, how could I make these things move?
But continued on and kind of carried my love of fantasy and dungeons and dragons, the things
that I used to do when I was a kid to kind of escape, that were looked down on, have
kind of come to fruition these days.
And I think that for me at least, the culmination of all that imagination kind of ends with
LARP.
I started out with Vampire LARP.
Which is a different beast all together.
I enjoyed my time with Vampire.
Currently, though, in Southern California, I have played through- I THINK, and I can't
be certain, with the exception of just a handful, I think I've hit all the major larps that
are in the area.
If anyone knows of any more, let me know, I wanna go.
But I've started to branch out and go to as many LARPs as possible within the United States,
and I'm looking to explore new and different LARPs as far out as I can find.
I also am working on my personal space, which is a LARP streaming tavern, called the Scabby
Rooster.
I named it the Scabby Rooster because that was the absolute worst name that I could come
up with, that followed traditional tavern naming convention.
I wrote the worst tavern that I could possibly imagine, in a fantasy world, and it needed
a name.
And this was the place that other taverns looked to to understand what a health code
violation was, in a time when they didn't have health code violations.
That morphed into something that I took to a LARP.
And I did that, and friends kind of came along on that journey with me, and we started to
create this kind of back story.
All these people came together and they formed this tavern, and we've built it.
And now we're building it physically here in Los Angeles, with the hope that this space
would become a meeting ground for LARPers, from all areas, from all countries, who are
in Los Angeles, who wanna come and either stream with us or come do maybe a parlor larp,
in an actual tavern space...
So that we can bring people in, and bring them into an immersive fully realized fantasy
tavern.
And have you involved in small little stories, puzzles, games, and then maybe- you know,
stick around.
And then we're gonna go to a local LARP.
And if you're not able to do that...
If you're not able to come to Southern California, you can find us online.
And you can join us there.
You can look at Twitter, the book of faces, Instagram, TikTok, you can look at... um,
most bathroom walls, uh... don't look at Yelp.
DON'T look at Yelp.
We're... not on Yelp.
(Fabienne off-camera: SAY TWITCH DOT TV SLASH SCABBY ROOSETER AGAIN.)
Twitch.tv/scabbyrooster.
You can kind of LARP along with us or explore LARP, even if it's something that you don't
understand- you can learn about it while we're doing it.
We're trying to build an immersive space that allows people to come in and be imaginative
and bring LARP into a setting that can be shared while being livestreamed.
Which is not as easy as it seems.
Does it seem easy?
I don't know.
It's not easy.
I feel like LARP is a collaborative art form.
I think that if you are a LARPer and you want to get more out of LARP, and you don't feel
like you're quite hitting your stride, um-
The best thing that you can do is find ways to contribute more.
As soon as you start finding ways to contribute and 'make your own game,' you're able to enrich
not only others and their story experience, but your own.
So, for me, I'd like to start finding ways to bring new and innovative elements into
LARP.
Now I know other LARPS have done certain things, I just wanna see where the envelope can be
pushed further.
So I'm hoping to bring more collaborative puppetry work into immersive, interactive
environments.
I wanna find creators who are doing the same thing.
And find out what works for them and what doesn't.
Because a lot of the problems that I keep running into, I know people have probably
already solved.
And I'd like to maybe come with some solutions for them.
(Az offscreen: What do you think of the new Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance on Netflix?)
Yeah...
So, how did this all start.
I....
*Sigh* Wow.
I am a child of a time period where magic was in very short supply.
Certain films in the cultural zeitgeist bubbled up and I think caused, really just....
....Permanent damage.
On whatever normality anyone ever expected out of me as a person.
So I was drawn in to movies like The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth, and Willow, and The
Last Unicorn, Legend, and maybe also we can blame Terry Gilliam because Time Bandits and
other movies that kind of pushed the boundaries of magical realism and fantasy at that time
period kinda came about.
I could on, here.
But there's a time period.
I was glued to these things.
And I wore out VHS copies- yes VHS copies- of these films and just started to imagine,
like, what would come next.
And I've imagined versions of The Dark Crystal time and time again.
And I have had like NO hope, at all- And I don't know why.
Because it's always been in the rumor house.
But I've had no hope that The Dark Crystal would actually see a sequel, or a prequel,
or anything like that.
We're in this era now of streaming services where they NEED content.
It is the Wild West and people are up in arms fighting each other to try to create amazing
things that are gonna draw niche groups to their streaming services.
And this created this perfect environment that allowed it to happen.
It's gonna create a culture, that is going to allow people to start questioning things.
How much do we need to use CGI?
How much of what we expect out of a film has to be done in a way that is 'technologically
advanced.'
NOT to say that Age of Resistance is not technologically advanced.
It is...
Amazing.
BUT they use these practical effects.
They use this physicality.
They use everything that made Dark Crystal Dark Crystal, and they don't take the conceit
of, 'Well, you know what, we can do it all CGI now.
Or we could just make it an animated cartoon.'
It would not feel like The Dark Crystal.
It would not feel like the world of the Dark Crystal.
Because there's a physicality to the puppets that Henson made with his team.
And...
They did it again.
And they did it in an era that has been devoid of that sort of magic for quite a while.
You're watching the puppets and you know that they're puppets but then you forget that they're
puppets.
Then in the back of your head you're like, 'These are puppets and people are puppetting
them,' and this...
Is blowing my freakin mind.
Because they're moving just like living creatures would.
And they don't feel human.
And it takes so many of the conceits and the horrid things about our own world, and puts
it on spotlight.
Like, the story of Age of Resistance is timely and timeless.
And they absolutely in my mind created a modern epic in a new way, that is not regurgitated.
It doesn't feel unnecessary.
Which is so rare in sequels today.
First and foremost I'm inspired.
And it's like... burning inside of me to start doing the things that I have so often put
to the side.
Here in LA there's a beautiful puppet culture.
Bob Baker Marionette has a theater troupe.
And if you're not familiar with them I highly recommend you look it up here on the internet.
They are...
Extreme artists.
They're individuals who are just out there doing things in the realm of puppetry.
And now I'm seeing this, like...
It's a resurgence.
And if you have any interest, and you LARP, I would recommend you find ways to incorporate
puppetry into your LARP.
Because I'm definitely going to be doing that.
And I would love to find people who are interested in taking that journey with me, and people
who are interested in creating in that way.
And making it happen as soon as possible.
So what does this do for me?
What does Age of Resistance do?
What does the idea of being able to do these things do for me?
Currently, it lights a fire underneath me.
And inside of me.
To make these things happen quickly.
What I'm hoping right now is that there's an entire generation of kids sitting infront
of their TVs, like I did what I watched Dark Crystal, and are imagining how they might
be able to make a pile of trash next to them move.
This new series is what happens when artists get the budget and the creative freedom that
they need.
This is the magic of practical effects.
So many artists that I have spoken to have said the same thing: That this has lit a creative
fire under them.
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is a masterpiece.
A masterpiece that I have been waiting my entire life to see.
And every second spent waiting was worth it.
Oh no I promised myself I'd never cry while I was wearin' cow ears...
*SNIFFLE* ohhhhh nooo
That's all I have for you this episode nerds, except actually to say that I have joined
TikTok now...
So, um...
Pray for me.
Thank you.
I mean, you can follow me if you want.
That would be cool of you.
Don't let me try to navigate TikTok alone aaah
If you have any questions, comments, emotional outbursts, if you would like to join the Adventuring
Party on Patreon or support this channel in any other way, links for all of that will
be in the description of this video.
And as always, thank you so much for liking us, subscribing to us, and creating with us.
(music)
#There will come a soldier, who carries a mighty sword.
He will tear your cities down, O lei O Lai O Lord,
O Lei, O Lai, O Lei, O Lord, He will tear your cities down, O lei O Lai O Lord.#