Remember earlier this year, when we were a little bit (maybe a lot bit) excited by the idea of building a parade-style backpack puppet. Well! Its come a little bit more to life. Check it out!
Talking Sound with HeatherEllen
Introducing… HeatherEllen Strain! HeatherEllen is Stage Manager and Sound Designer, and will be joining the feather tales team to help bring the sounds of our story to life.
When Daniel and I first started working together, he would bring his guitar to share short themes he had been working on. (You can hear these in our radio play). We knew that sound would play an important part in sharing Kookaburra and Chickadee’s journey, but as I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been teaching ourselves a lot of new skills while we create from a distance. So… why not bring in a knowledgeable friend for some help? (now I have the Beatles stuck in my head. I get by with a little help from my friends….)
Image descriptions
Image 1: HeatherEllen is standing in the foreground of the photo, she is standing in a park which is blurred in the background. She is wears an earpiece, and has a tattoo of a hand holding playing cards on her right arm. HeatherEllen is holding up Leko the french bulldog, partially covering her face.
Image 2: Five smiling facing dressed in black, standing in front of a shipwreck set against a back background. From left to right, they are Martha Ross (director), Danielle Eyer (assistant stage manager), Caite Clark (assistant director), HeatherEllen Strain (stage manager), and Al Tom (assistant stage manager)
So what does a Sound Designer do?
Being a lighting designer, I usually think about what I want people to see before considering what I want people to hear. I sat down to ask HeatherEllen a couple questions (from distance, of course):
How did you become interested in sound design?
HeatherEllen: I’ve always been interested in sound! I spent years making little songs on GarageBand with loops. I was a band kid until I came to university. Then in my second year at Concordia I took an electroacoustics elective which was amazing. Sound manipulation in non-musical ways was even more fun to me, so I ended up taking a second elective class in it too. Then one of the shows I was stage managing was missing a sound designer and it all lined up!
Have you worked with puppets before?
Yes! I used some simple hand puppets as a medium for a storytelling class, and also took a puppetry elective (with Caite). As someone who gets stage fright it was a great way to still enjoy taking a performative elective without it being “me”. Plus making them is really fun.
What about sound is important, what should people know?
What you’re hearing can really effect the tone and setting of a scene. It can also make the scene feel more realistic, or more stylized depending what you’re going for. Sound lets you continue to describe and understand what’s happening on the stage (or film or other medium) without the characters having to explain it to you, just as the set and costumes and lighting do. They’re all just different pieces of the puzzle.
What does a project look like for you from start to finish?
Typically I make a scene list, then write sounds that would fit in each scene somewhere, as well as figuring out if the team I’m working with is interested in transitional sounds between scenes. If they need to be location specific (ie. Australian outback, kookaburra laughs, chickadee calls) then I’ll do some research on YouTube or other sources. Then I find, or create the sounds I want! Freesound.org is VERY helpful, but I also try and do as many of my own recordings as possible. For editing I use a combination of Ableton, Amadeus Pro, Audacity and still occasionally GarageBand. And usually sit through rehearsal adding the sounds into Qlab*, and writing down on a cue list where I want them. If there are bigger atmospheric or more musical sounds then I tend to run them by the director first to make sure we’re on the same page about things. Then I go through MANY round of edits and different Qlab files until the director and I are both satisfied with the result!
What are you excited to make for feather tales?
I’m really excited to make the outdoor atmospheres. Partly it’s just me missing the outdoors right now, and also Australia is a place I’ve wanted to go my whole life. I love the biodiversity they have over there, so getting to replicate the sonic portion of that is very exciting to me. The wildfire sound is also an exciting prospect.
*Qlab is a software HeatherEllen and other stage managers use to program sound and video elements in order to play at the right time during a performance
We’re live!
Well, not performing live (yet!), but our #ArtApart video is! See what the beginnings of feather tales looks like over at The National Theatre School of Canada:
There’s been a lot of online discussion surrounding productivity while we’re all confined to our homes. More specifically, the theatre community has been talking about how we transition to working digitally, when we are an industry built on gathering and live performance.
Our new circumstances have presented challenges; not only how to continue creating, but how do we create work on platforms that are largely unfamiliar to us? Daniel and I have been teaching ourselves how to edit video and sound out of necessity, but it’s also a great skill to have in your back pocket.
Throughout this push to create our show, I am grateful to say that I haven’t felt forced to be creative, or rather keep creating. Working with chickadee and kookaburra is a great joy for Daniel and I. We’ve been able to forgive ourselves when zoom is being particularly faulty, and we can laugh at the absurdity of two pixelated hand puppets talking to each other over a webcam.
As our industry is rewarding ingenuity and resourcefulness, I’ve realized the reason we wanted to keep working was because we were genuinely excited. Even months before when we were able to meet in person, our creative sessions crackled with enthusiasm and laughter. Sure, this story comes from personal experience and is close to our hearts, but the need to keep working came from our creative partnership. It is not a pressure to be productive, or participate in the adapting capabilities of our art form, but the need to see a familiar face in an uncertain time.
We’ll be bringing more of feather tales to you in the coming weeks, as we develop and animate our script into a four part video series. In the meantime, we’d love to hear how you are finding creativity or joy while we’re apart.
From Capo to Backpack Puppet
written by Daniel
Get ready for a side story.
At the beginning of working on our show for young audiences, feather tales, Caite and I were talking a lot about the ways we could bring our bird characters to life. At the same time, I was noodling on my guitar a bunch and, so, my brain connected the two. BOOM! Kookaburra on a capo.
I really just wanted an object to begin to be able to bring the Kookaburra to life with. And the Capo on my guitar (a little tool used to change the pitch of all the strings at once) seemed remarkably similar to a Kookaburra beak. My fascination with the capo lasted a good 2 minutes. And it definitely served its purpose in terms of beginning to visualize Kookaburra. See if you can spot it in the feather tales video trailer!
BUT MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY – it lead me to the beautiful new world of backpack puppets.
Honestly, I can’t even remember how I got onto this video, but at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown in Canada, I stumbled across this beautiful puppet – Janggaburru – created by Memetica for the town of Yungaburra in far north Queensland, Australia. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU5AncbZVm4) Having just been locked inside and desperate to latch onto a creative project, I fell head over heals into creating my very own puppet of this size.
It started with the most horrifically ugly head. I swear. It was awful. It looked like an alien horse. Then came a more filled out face. Hands. Feet. An attempt to make it stand up while it was snowing outside. And now there is a skeleton. Yay!
Daniel’s puppet making in process
At this stage, I’m having a little bit of trouble with the strength of the frame used to hold up the puppet. But, again, I stumbled across another beautiful puppet by Taralyn Jaiyeola (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjf2ScmJ8Fo) and realized that there are some fundamental structural changes I need to make.
This isn’t strictly a Young Hearts Theatre project (yet! – Caite, I’ll send you a text about it). But I wanted to speak to where my curiosity is leading at the moment when not thinking about feather tales – and you better believe it has everything to do with giant puppets.
Introducing: feather tales
Hiya, Caite here!
I met Daniel Hickie some time in 2019 (or was it earlier? let me text Daniel!) at the Unitarian Church of Montreal. Daniel and I work there as Religious Explorations teachers, where both our theatre training and love for working with young people became immediately evident.
That summer, Daniel and I forged a partnership that would soon become Young Hearts Theatre, an initiative to provide creative experiences for young people. We started working on feather tales, a project for Montreal St. Ambroise Off-Fringe Festival. We were chugging along; writing our play, speaking to festival organizers and our hosting venue, when everything came to halt due to COVID-19.
Confined to our respective homes, we were committed to continue creating. Montreal Fringe hadn’t officially been cancelled yet, and we were still in the preliminary stages of building our story. Following Fringe’s announcement to postpone, we received an #artapart grant from the National Theatre School of Canada, granting us financial support to continue creating work that otherwise would have been lost. Daniel and I are embarking on this journey through physical distancing. We share videos, sound files, and images over wetransfer, have production meetings on zoom, and co write our script via shared google docs. How do you create a puppet show over video chat? We’re still discovering!
This blog will not only follow the development of feather tales through #artapart, but will serve as a platform for Young Hearts Theatre and projects to come. Thank you for joining us.
Young Hearts Theatre/ Le Théâtre des Jeunes Cœurs 