[MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING]
[SARAH] Hello, my name is Sarah Fornace,
and I'm one of the co-artistic directors of Manual Cinema.
[JULIA] Hi, my name is Julia Miller,
and I'm also one of the co-artistic directors,
[SARAH] In "Leonardo and Sam", Emily
makes a manual cinema, which is a puppet
show that looks like a movie, that's
made live with paper puppets.
Usually, we do these shows live on stage,
and at the end of the show, we would invite all of you
up on stage with all of us to see the puppets
and learn about how to make it yourselves.
We can't do that, so today, we thought
we would give you a little bit of a behind the scenes
tour of our puppet set up here in our studio in Chicago.
There's a couple of different ways
we do storytelling with these puppets,
and one way is through movement.
How the puppets move tell you what's going on in the story
and how they're feeling.
So this is the first paper Leonardo we see in the show.
And in this scene, he is a small monster who's
trying to be big and scary.
So he pops up into the screen, and he waves his arms,
and goes, rawr!
To make that happen, we made the arms and the body out
of different pieces of paper and attached them
with a little piece of wire.
Then we taped the wire and the stick onto the puppet
so that we can hold it off screen and the puppet
without seeing our hands.
Argh!
[JULIA] Another type of puppet is this Leo puppet, who,
because we need to show so many different emotions
in the characters, he actually has two different expressions.
This one on his front, and then this one on his back.
And by flipping the puppet, we're
able to show him feeling different things, which
is something we use with all of the characters,
because of all the different feelings they have.
The movie is about big feelings, so the puppets
need to do big movements and have big facial expressions.
One thing we ask ourselves when making a puppet
is what's happening at this point in the story,
and what type of puppet do we need to build?
One of my favorite puppets is this puppet
of Ms. Hebrides, the monster librarian.
And as you can see, it's not all of Ms. Hebrides,
it's just her eyes, because this is for a part of the story
where she's looking for information.
So I decided to just build her eyes so that we could really
look at her looking close up.
[JULIA] Versus this puppet where she's dancing,
we have to see her whole body and her arms,
and it also has her on both sides
so she can really get down.
[SARAH] The set up that we have to make our manual cinema
is a lot like a setup that you might have at home.
We have a camera that doesn't move,
and we have a monitor where we can see ourselves.
And this is a lot like Zoom or Google Hangouts
or any of the different video programs
that you might be using to go to school
or to hang out and meet with family and friends.
In this style of movie, the camera stays still,
and we move our bodies and the puppets
around to tell the story.
So it's a little bit like a dance.
Entrances and exits are very important,
and are one way that we can play with the camera.
[JULIA] And we also use those techniques to create
different transitions, like for this bus shot,
I'm going to swipe the puppet in front of the camera to bring it in,
I'll zoom it out, and give it a little motion
to show them riding the bus, and then I'll swipe it off.
So that's all me creating movement
around the fixed camera.
[SARAH] We also use another style of puppetry in the movie,
which is shadow puppetry.
So for those puppets, they're cut out of paper,
and they don't have the same detail
as the illustrated puppets, because we
are going to light them in shadow
and we just need the silhouette.
So anything you saw in black and white was a shadow puppet.
[JULIA] So for that, we have a piece of vellum,
but you can use wax paper, you could use printer paper.
[SARAH] A shower curtain, a bed sheet.
[JULIA] A bed sheet.
And you're going to just light it
from behind to show the shadow.
So for example--
[SARAH] So I've got my trusty flashlight,
and I put it behind the screen, and we can see Kerry in shadow.
[JULIA] So there's another type of puppetry we use in the show.
[SARAH] In addition to puppetry, a big part of a manual cinema
do it yourself movie is sound and music.
So now I want to introduce you to a couple
of our other collaborators, Kyle and Ben,
who did all of the music and sound score for the show,
and they'll tell you about how they did it.
[BEN] Hello, my name is Ben Kauffman
I'm one of the five co-artistic directors of Manual Cinema,
and myself and Kyle Vegter created
all of the music and sound design
in "Leo and Sam" the movie.
We're here in our small sound studio in Chicago,
where the music and the sound was created.
And I wanted to give you a quick walk through of how
we made the music for the show.
Perhaps the most important instrument
that we used to make the music was the computer.
Yes, the computer is also an instrument.
And the most important thing about the computer
that it allowed us to do with the music
was that we get to watch the film totally silently,
and try out different musical ideas to go along
with each scene.
And we can try lots of different things,
we can change things as we go, and we
have that feedback of always having the visuals to go along
with the music.
So I'm going to play a short scene now,
and you'll be able to see the visuals from the show,
as well as lots of the music and notes and rhythms and all
the things that we created.
Let me show you that now.
[MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING]
[KYLE] Hello, my name is Kyle Vegter.
I'm one of the co-artistic directors of Manual Cinema,
and I'm going to talk a little bit about sound design
in "Leonardo and Sam".
So in this piece, sound design is really
just the last layer on top of the visuals and the music.
And it's just to create a sense of space,
and to give meaning to some of the events in the piece,
and we often do that by layering a lot of different sounds
to create a feeling or an event in the piece.
So I'm going to take the example of the moment the film breaks
in the beginning of the piece, and just
take you through the different layers of sound
that you're hearing there.
So the first one is just the sound of a film reel.
[FILM REEL SOUND]
And that just plays pretty much continuously,
until it breaks at least.
And then we've got this horror movie music that starts out
sounding normal, and as the film breaks,
it goes down in pitch, just to convey
that's something breaking.
[MUSIC - "PSYCHO THEME SONG"]
So there, it broke.
Ahh!
And then we've got the actual sound of the break itself.
[CACAPHONY OF NOISES]
And then we've also got this countdown, like film countdown
sound that also starts at a normal pitch,
and as the film breaks, it goes down in pitch
to convey that something's broken.
[FILM REEL SOUND] Sounds normal.
You hear it go down in pitch, oh no!
[BLIP SOUND LOWERING IN PITCH]
And then finally, we've got some good old static that comes in
after it's really broken.
So it breaks.
And then just a little bit of chaotic static.
It's relatively quiet in the mix.
And so altogether, it sounds, one second, like this.
[MUSIC - "PSYCHO THEME SONG"]
[SOUND EFFECTS OF FILM BREAKING]
Hope you enjoyed the piece.
I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes puppet time,
and I hope that you grab some paper, grab some sticks,
and make your own manual cinemas at home.
[JULIA] Take care.
[SARAH] Bye.
[MELLOW MUSIC PLAYING]