The Making of The Story of Henny Penny

The Making of The Story of Henny Penny - Page Text Content

S: The making of the story of Henny Penny Workbook by Dagmara Rudkin

FC: The making of the story of Henny Penny | Workbook by Dagmara Rudkin

1: Introduction The Story of Henny Penny started a few years ago with a five-day illustration workshop run by Chris Gilvan Cartwright aka The Baron Gilvan at the Phoenix, Brighton where I work as a painter. I wanted to illustrate a children’s story but struggled with creating the right imagery. Chris advised me to make a 3D character which I could draw afterwards. I thought of Foxy Woxy and Turkey Lurkey in ‘The Story of Henny Penny” because I knew I could indulge myself bringing sinister undertones into some junk models of characters from a tale I enjoyed watching with my children. Although my creatures were not meant to be puppets but models for drawings, they soon seemed to become characters in their own right. It felt wrong to use them as still images only; it seemed to me that they should be allowed to speak and breath. And thus the idea of creating an animation was born. | Because I had no prior experience in animating, I knew that I had to find the right visual language to allow me to develop my puppets without needing the knowledge of armature building or using complex animating techniques. Since materials were to be an important tool in illustrating the flawed personalities of Henny and her companions, I decided to go back to my memories of my Polish childhood and reach for old Eastern European animation and puppetry performances as a source of my inspiration. Just like Henny Penny herself, I did not complete this journey on my own and soon friends and family joined in. I will be forever in debt to Richard Morton who wrote the music, my husband Charles, who wrote the script and, with a gentle guidance of Paul Stones provided the voice-overs, Wendy Pye who transformed my story telling with her editing talents, Simon Yapp who added sound-scapes, Richard Clarke who filmed Black Forest scenes and Isobel Smith, Matt Rudkin, Fiammetta Horvat and Ruby Hermon, the talented puppeteers. To my parents

2: Planning the story The content of the "Story of Henny Penny" is faithful to a traditional version of this well -known 19th Century cautionary tale. Because I wanted each character to represent different human vices, just like in Aesop’s tales, I asked my co-writer to help me with retelling the story and to bring contemporary vices such as obsessions with celebrities and fame, and vices that are timeless: greed, arrogance, gullibility. I started my work by drawing rough sketches in my sketchbooks and diaries but the final storyboard ended up in a long paper roll-like format. Just as in the old fashioned non-digital editorial suites, I was able to replace frames and literally cut and paste scenes. I did not have to use my computer and felt liberated by the immediacy of being able to add and remove drawings from the scroll. I liked the physicality of rolling and unrolling the scroll which made me think of the linear quality of this story.

4: Henny Penny Henny Penny is the old aunty that we all have in our families. She is the one who is always on the look out, spying through the window behind the lace curtains. Henny Penny feels responsible for offering solutions to all worldly affairs and while crocheting containers for toilet brushes and putting jigsaw puzzles together, she plots ways of saving the world from moral decay.

6: Fabrics that are crocheted, knitted, stitched and embroidered. | Small puzzle pieces for feathers. They came from the “Da Vinci Code” as she will no doubt be a great enthusiast of Dan Brown’s books and conspiracy theories in general | One giant puzzle piece for Henny’s comb. This particular piece had a cottage flowers pattern and is part of a children’s jigsaw puzzle about farm animals. This fits nicely with Henny’s world. | Crochet and lace gloves for her tail and feathers | Old-fashioned bra for her wing with a few jigsaw puzzle pieces added for feathery texture. Nothing too saucy for Henny | Upholstery pliers for her beak. House-proud Henny likes domestic activities | Fabric rose petal for the all-seeing eye | Forks for her feet. Chickens are always preoccupied with scratching and looking for food. It makes sense that Henny would use silver forks and not her hands or, worse, feet. | Small fabric roses used for making greeting cards for the red flesh around Henny’s eye

8: Cocky Locky Cocky Locky is a poor aristocrat, a dandy who likes nothing better than playing “whist” with his friends at his chateau by which he means Texas Hold’em poker. My source of inspiration were French noblemen’s 18th Century clothes.

10: Cards for his chest as a reference to his fondness for playing poker | Velvet glove for his comb | Ties for his tail to show his dandy nature | Giant ribbon for his wattle | Fancy vintage fabrics embroidered with a golden thread | Tassels and a hook for his manly parts

12: Goosey Lucey Initially, I thought of giving Goosey a Russian look because I associated her with Russian folk tales. Because geese are very vocal, I thought that she might have been a storyteller, or rather, an unstoppable gossip. However, upon the realisation of how convincingly the human arm mimics Goosey’s neck, I felt that she didn’t need complicated accessories. Goosey is made out of celebrity magazines because she is obsessed with the Royal Family and other high-profile non-entities. Most of all, of course, she is obsessed with herself. Goosey spends her time grooming her feathers, admiring her reflection and reading celebrity magazines. Because she is made out of pictures and headlines, she can ruffle her feathers and catch up with latest gossips at the same time.

14: Celebrity and beauty magazines for her body and feathers | An evening glove for her neck and the head | Acrylic nails painted with orange brocade nail varnish for her beak

16: Turkey Lurkey Turkeys are fascinating animals to watch. Their reptilian necks look ancient and the way their extravagant plumage opens and closes recalls complicated medieval war machines. Because of turkeys’ exotic origin and looks, I thought of Turkey Lurkey as a warrior: a crusader adorned with looted treasures from Constantinople or a conquistador in weathered armour. But, despite his old brigadier like aura, we quickly realise that Turkey never fought real battles. His medal is, in fact, just an ornament made out of a boot polish tin.

20: Baked bean and tinned tomato cans for feathers and his toenails | Black gloves with acrylic nails for tail feathers | Lace, beads and buttons for his neck | Plastic hubcap for a base of his tail | Medal: rusty top of a boot polish tin and a plastic Christmas decoration. The “Dome” logo makes a nice connection with his house and also the Royal Pavilion in Brighton which looks as exotic, extravagant and out of place as Turkey himself. | Pink tights for his neck and the head | Fans for his wings | Thick garden gloves for his feet | Small fabric roses used for making greeting cards for the red flesh around Henny’s eye

22: Duckey Luckey Ducks make me think of China for two reasons. Peking Duck is traditionally served in Chinese restaurant (and perhaps that’s how Foxy would ideally have had her for his dinner) and china ducks traditionally fly on people’s living room walls. Initially, Ducky Luckey was meant to see the future in the stars but a tealeaf reading gave me an opportunity to make a reference to Chinese tea. Useless as she is, Ducky sees herself as a Mystic creature of the Orient. | The pattern on the papier-maché cup that Ducky uses for her readings is inspired by plants from Henny Penny and later on, Foxy Woxy’s worlds and traditional Chinese symbols of Good Fortune.

24: Palmist gloves for her wings | Chinese spoons for her head and the beak | Chinese-style bathrobe for her plumage | Fortune cookie for her eye | Chinese bells for her legs | Chinese Good Luck decorations for her feet

26: Foxy Woxy Unlike Henny and her associates, Foxy Woxy is not bound to a 2D world and obeys rules of his own making. He can move effortlessly and appears and disappears as if possessing supernatural powers. I think of him as a macabre version of the Cheshire Cat. Unlike other puppets whose movements are highly stylised, I felt that Foxy’s puppet had to recall real fox poses, combined with movements of dogs, cats and even vampires (as we imagined them). My sketches of Foxy’s tilted, inquisitive head and his slouched body were later used to guide puppets’ choreography.

30: Red feathers for his eye brows and a tail | Pringles with 20% discount because he is a dodgy dealer | Coca cola can for his body | Red crisp packet for his back | Plastic forks for his top teeth and claws | Shoe sole for one thigh and his lower jaw | Leather jacket: collar for his ear and part of his face. Button hole for one of his eyes | Dolls fingers and toes for his bottom teeth | Child’s plastic gun for his right front arm | Jeans: zip for a second eye (so it can open or close). The pull of a zip slider that looks like a teardrop tattoo | Milk bottles for part of his head and his torso | Champagne cork for the tip of his nose (because he likes to party with style)

32: The World of Gloves Making “The Story of Henny Penny” was the main focus of my MA course. I dedicated my energies to investigating the symbolical properties of objects and materials in creating characters and story telling. The visual language throughout this project made constant references to hand made objects, traditional puppet theatre and hand animation. Inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s chess-like figurines representing Perseus and Calibos whose fates were decided by the Greek gods in “Clash of the Titans” in a game of chess, I considered using photographs of my puppets which were to be moved by giant gloves of the grand manipulator Foxy Woxy. A differently gloved hand would introduce each character, cutting out their silhouettes with a different set of scissors. After I realised that showing Penny and other creatures as only photographs did not show the three-dimensional properties of materials they were made of, I decided to make puppeteers gloved hands an integral feature of each character. This decision was influenced by my childhood memories of watching performances with glove puppets but also by works of Czech animators: Jiri Trnka (“The Hand”) and Jiri Barta (“The Vanished World of Gloves”) and recent Charlei Danses’ “Kiss and Cry”. In my animations, gloves are used in each creature but for a different body part. Different gloves were to tell stories of battles, psychic powers or domesticity.

34: Prior to making the final puppets, I experimented with rough prototypes.

35: Foxy Woxy, as a more complex and a mysterious creature, does not have to obey the same set of rules. His hands have two aspects. The first are his teeth, which are made of plastic doll’s fingers (his molars are made out of same doll’s toes). Initially, I contemplated animating a scene, in which we would see a close up of plastic fingers turning into real child’s wriggling fingers. Foxy’s hands and feet are made out of children booties and plastic forks. However, because we know that the Red Gloves planted the Red Button- Foxy’s eye and the Red Gloves threw the discarded parts of Foxy’s victims out of The Big Black Cave we can assume that Red Gloves are also Foxy’s hands. Foxy can swap parts of his body as he wishes. As the owner of the Red Gloves, he is the main player and the director-the puppet master who orchestrated the entire tragedy.

36: Because in my retelling of “The Story of Henny Penny” I wanted Foxy Woxy to be a character that initiated the quest of saving the world from a falling sky, I decided to find an object that could replace the acorn and to become an essential tool in luring gullible Henny and the other creatures. And, since Foxy’s eyes were made out of button slits in my coat and jeans, the missing button was the answer. In the opening scene, the hole in the fence and Henny’s spying eye are mirrored by the Red Button that mysterious red-gloved hands lower on a fishing rod. I wanted my audience to feel intrigued: Whose hands are they? Why the button? So it was not the scrap of sky that fell on Henny or even the acorn, but the Red Button, planted by a stranger. As the story unfolds, we will see the Red Button guiding and luring Henny first and later her companions. It is the Red Button’s mission to make false promises and to tempt them with images fulfilling their dreams of won poker games and fame. Once the mission is accomplished- Henny and her mates arriving in the Big Black Forest– the Red Button comes back to it’s rightful owner, the buttonhole-eyed Foxy Woxy. | The Red Button Initially, I struggled with an imaginative way of representing the acorn falling on Henny’s head. The acorn seemed to me so irrelevant to the rest of the story that drawing or making it felt pointless. I thought of making Henny’s world out of jigsaw puzzle pieces (in reference to her feathers but also her orderly ways of organising the world around her), with a puzzle piece taken out by a giant (Foxy’s) hand. With a middle piece removed, Henny’s world would start falling apart. But this idea seemed to be visually complicated and contrived. Since I wanted to make references to ways of story telling that uses objects and materials symbolically and in technically unsophisticated way, my tutor advised me to look at Jacobean theatre and how simple props can represent the world–for example a circular shape on the rod held by an actor, would stand for a rising Moon.

38: Although Cocky Locky has been unlucky in his card games and in fact spent his fortune not on repairing his roof tiles but on indulging his gambling habits, he now feels that he is really close indeed to winning the game. He is so close that, in fact, all he needs, is a one a more lucky card to complete the Royal Flush! It is just as well that The Red Button is here to transform the lame Three of Hearts into the Ace of Spades. Unknowing to Cocky Locky, this is the death card. But he is too busy to think about it; he must prevent the sky from falling so he can win his game. | Dream Sequence: Cocky Locky

40: It is hard for Goosey to concentrate on other creatures’ worries. Her head just can’t contain so many thoughts. And her mirror is not big enough to show her graceful neck. How splendid to have a bigger mirror lowered to see her reflection! The Red Button offers an image that Goosey cannot resist, the beautiful, red blood choker. To an outsider’s eye, this may look like a slit throat and the big mirror like a funeral wreath but Goosey knows that the court will find her looks sensational. The Red Button promises that it is not the pictures of the Royal couple that will fill the headlines. | Dream Sequence: Goosey

42: Turkey Lurkey wants to join Henny’s quest because he is desperate to prove that he is a courageous and a worthy warrior. His claims of battles won in service to the Queen and her father before, are highly suspect: why would he wear a medal made out of a boot polish tin? It seems that the Red Button knows what Turkey’s secret desire is; it presents him with a vision of transforming his fake medal into Victoria Cross and therefore, a true recognition of Turkey Lurkey’s bravery | Dream Sequence: Turkey Lurkey

44: Ducky has been staring into her cup for some time. However hard and long and intently she has been staring, there was just nothing to see. When The Red Button falls into her cup, shapes suddenly appear. In his arrogance and quite a justified blasé attitude to his future victims, Foxy doesn’t even bother to cover his identity. Just for a moment, Ducky truly sees the future: a silhouette of a Fox that transforms into a skull and later the Blood Moon. But she is too excited to spend time on reading such unsettling signs. She must go and tell the Queen of her prophetic powers. | Dream Sequence: Duckey Luckey

46: Henny Penny’s world is bright and sunny, dominated by a fence covered with lace because, just as Victorian matrons, she cannot bear a thought of exposing anything that is bare. It is simply indecent. The lace pattern that adorns Henny’s fence and her body, appears throughout the entire animation. As Henny’s quest goes on, and we come closer to the world of Foxy, the colours become darker and shapes of flowers and trees with lace patterns, more sinister and warped. | The flat world of Henny Penny Henny Penny and her companions belong to a different dimension than Foxy Woxy. When seen in the animation individually, they are attached to a black crushed velvet background. They are like glistening jewels in display cabinets, ready to be collected by Foxy. They are almost 2D and their movements are as restricted as are their views on and understanding of the world. When shown as a group, Henny and her fellow travellers are shown as little puppets on a lollipop sticks. Symbolically, this gives them a stronger sense of vulnerability and incompetence and refers to the tradition of old fashioned children theatres that partially inspired my animation.They never had a will of their own and their actions are being orchestrated by a red-gloved puppeteer for his own amusement. On a practical level, this approach also allowed me to show the characters exploring the landscape using very simple animation techniques. In order to allow my audience to make sense of the transition from the “solo part” as tactile, large puppets attached to a black background to the flat paper environment, I introduced the Paper Theatre which contains the flat world of Henny Penny. Wheeled and opened by the Red Gloves, adorned with shapes that are spikey and twisted, not unlike Foxy’s teeth and Foxy’s forest, the theatre looks more like a hearse. The play promises to have a very dark ending indeed.

52: The Little Black Forest The Little Black Forest offered the possibility of a transition from 2D to 3D world and from small scale into large scale. Plants are almost the same, except that they are black and white and are strangely distorted, twisted and warped, often growing fish bones- remains of Foxy’s feasts.

56: The Big Black Forest Making large -scale scenery was important to establish the world of Foxy. Prior to this, I tried working with a small model of a forest only, replacing the real puppet with it’s scaled-down photograph but this approach produced unsatisfying compromise. Giving the puppet an environment where it could easily move about created far more convincing, moody and gritty world. In comparison to the confident Foxy, the small lollipop stick puppets look pathetic and hopeless. Even before they follow Foxy to his cave, we are fairly certain that they are here to meet their doom. In practical terms, the making was quite straight forward as all shapes are simply cardboard mounted photocopies of smaller pen and ink drawings collaged with fragments of a lace (which I used to make Henny Penny). The peculiarity of the aesthetics employed- flat, unashamedly unreal cardboard forest with an obvious presence of puppeteers bodies and almost life like Foxy, created an unsettled feeling which suggest a sinister ending to an audience.

60: Notes on the music for "The Story of Henny Penny" animation "The role of the music in Henny Penny is to enhance each character's personality while also providing a sense of momentum as the team grows and progresses along their journey. Cocky Locky's theme is inspired the 'minuet' - a dance form that was usually practised by the more wealthy members of society in the eighteen century. Goosey Loosey's theme is a 'romance' more typical of 19th century classical composers and reflects her love for herself rather than to another. Turkey Lurkey is given a heroic march to reflect his self proclaimed bravery. Inspired by music from Eastern-Asia,Ducky Lucky's theme aims to draw attention to the fabric that has been used for her puppet and also to act as an outdated reference to what used to be considered mystical and unknown. The music for Foxy Woxy and the forest features electronic and synth sounds to convey the character's dark intentions and superior intellect. As Foxy is the only 3-D puppet, the music also helps to highlight that contrast against the other 2-D characters. A source of inspiration for the music in Henny Penny is Sergei Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf". Richard Morson Richard Morson is a composer based in Brighton and Hove working towards a career in writing music for film and television. Some more examples of his work can be heard herehttps://soundcloud.com/rimomusic | Notes on the sound engineering for "The Story of Henny Penny" animation "I started by envisioning sounds possible to create from materials used in making the characters and the set. Contorting paper pads, rustling fabric, stretching tape from it's reel; exploring how controlling the speed and shape of movements would produce organic effects within the limits of what was on screen somewhere. Mining the out takes and cutting into the narration, I extracted and modulated breaths and vocal improvisations. Reverbs and delays set the soundstage with uneven timings and placements in the stereo field to make tensions and depths that could be changed over the course of scenes, responding to emotions and movements" Simon Yapp Simon Yapp is a multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer who works under the streets of Kemptown in Brighton @ Underground Studio.

61: Credits Script and voice overs Charles Rudkin Editor Wendy Pye Camera (The Little and The Big Black Forest scenes) Richard Clarke Music Richard Morson Sound engineering and sound-scapes Simon Yapp Voice coaching Paul Stones Pupeteers Matt Rudkin (Foxy Wox Fiammetta Horvat (Foxy Woxy) Ruby Hermon (Foxy Woxy) Isobel Smith (Turkey Lurkey's feet) Puppet Choreography Adviser Isobel Smith Art work, Animation, Stills, Dagmara Rudkin | Special thanks to: my MA tutors: Karen Morgan Margaret Huber Graham Rawle Jackie Batey my friends and family: Alix Dreiling Conrad and Titus Rudkin Gene Hart-Basnett