Author Archives: lance

Foam Puppet Making

Posted on October 17, 2011 by lance| Leave a comment

Over the weekend I spent a good part of the day making my first foam puppet.  He’s just about finished, but he needs a few more accessories, and an arm or two would be nice.

Here is the almost-finished puppet, I call him:  Professor!

a blue white bearded muppet puppetI’d love to show you how I made him, but in all truth, I totally winged this project.  No patterns, no mock-ups, just cut and go.  Very happy with the way everything ended up this first time around.

I did a nice bit of web searching before I even attempted to make this foam puppet.  Here are some of the sites I visited:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2007/06/foam-puppet-making.html

http://puppeteersunite.com/

http://www.projectpuppet.com/

Here is a rough sketch of the pieces I cut out of the foam.  The main head parts were a little bit more egg-shaped (pointy side) on the tops and bottoms.

puppet parts cut from the foam

Here are some things that I’ve learned while making the Professor:

  1. Making puppets is fun!
  2. Always have lots of hot glue sticks ready
  3. Use razor blades to cut foam and use with caution
  4. Keep a sharpie handy
  5. Save the scraps, at least the bigger ones
  6. Be patient, especially if this is your first puppet!

Getting the “skin” on the Professor wasn’t exactly easy.  Since I didn’t start with a pattern, I wasn’t sure what size pieces to cut.  Also, cutting pieces of fabric to fit over rounded foam heads is tricky!  The Professor has a bit of a patchwork look because of this, and a few small spots that are made up from the scraps.

All in all not bad, the hot glue keeps it all together nicely.  Speaking of materials, all of the fabric for this project came from the 1/2 off remnants at our Jo-Ann’s fabric store, so the total cost of this puppet is probably somewhere in the  realm of $15 or less.  Not bad I say, not bad at all!

I will post more when the arms are finished, and if any accessories are made, I’ll let you know.  Just wanted to share this new project while I’m making it!

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Posted in Foam Puppets, Puppets

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Audacity for recording small audio clips

Posted on September 7, 2011 by lance| 4 Comments

I use Audacity for recording all my sound.  Songs, clips, voice overs, all recorded in Audacity.  You can find Audacity here:  Audacity Homepage it’s free software that is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

My needs are pretty straightforward in most cases, I record mostly mono sound using one microphone.  See my setup below, I’m using the Blue Yeti microphone as the recording device, and same for the playback (listening) device.  The recording mode is set to mono (one channel of sound).

audacity audio recording programThe control buttons are pretty easy, the red circle starts recording, the yellow square stops the recording, and the green triangle plays back what you’ve just recorded.

In the screenshot below, you’ll see some audio that I’ve recorded, represented by the blue wavy line that follows along the track.  The bigger the line, the louder the audio!  Getting your sound out of audacity is a snap, you can go to File – Export, and the sound clip will convert into the format of your choosing.  I stick with WAV files mostly, to preserve the quality of the audio until the final processing in OpenShot (if I’m making a video).

Exporting audio out of AudacityI encourage you to try out Audacity, especially if all you’ve ever used is the Windows sound recorder.  Let me know how it goes!

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Video editing with OpenShot in Ubuntu

Posted on August 29, 2011 by lance| Leave a comment

With my recent pickup of making short movies, I needed to find some software on the cheap to make it all happen.  I tried using the Microsoft Movie maker that comes with Windows 7, but it felt limited, with no apparent track mixing or layering.

I’m a big fan of Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com), a popular free open source Operating system, and I’ve used it on and off since version 4.  They’re up to version 11.04 now, wowser!  They have a neat utility called WUBI that lets you install Ubuntu inside of Windows, so things don’t get too messy with your system.

After installing Ubuntu onto my computer, I sought out some of the free video editing tools that are available.  One of them Pitivi, comes with Ubuntu by default but didn’t seem to have enough features, kind of like the Movie Maker for Windows.  After a quick google search I found OpenShot Video Editor.  I’ve been using it for all of my little movies so far, and it’s great!

It uses multiple tracks to let you merge multiple audio, video, and graphics streams at once.  Take a look at the screenshot below, this is the latest project I’m working on, Friends Group Episode 4.

Latest Video Project in Open Shot

making a video in open shot with multiple tracks

You can also see in the screenshot the export process.  This is where the magic happens!  When you add all the clips, audio, and graphic slides and overlays together, the export encodes your video into one continuous file that plays each clip exactly where you placed it on the mixer.  For overlays, like a graphic that you want to appear over some video, it goes in a layer above the video, so that it isn’t covered up by the video.

Now, I can’t do everything in OpenShot.  The graphics I create are mostly made in InkScape, a very fun program to use for making vector based graphics, also Open Source (free!).  And the audio I create is done in Audacity, another super useful Open Source program that lets you mix multiple tracks together and export into many different formats.  I’ll have plenty of posts about these tools coming up, as they are crucial to making the whole process work together.

I’ll go into more detail about the editing process, but wanted to introduce you to a great software tool that I’ve been using quite successfully!  Thanks for reading.

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Posted in Audio/Video, Movies and Clips, Process

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