![\"A](\"/assets/blog/week-in-review-41/ac-lift.jpg\")
\n\nSomething I didn't mention that made the last couple weeks even more annoying than I already mentioned is that our AC broke at the beginning of a heatwave! I kept trying to blow air past frozen cold packs and convincing myself it was making things better but it didn't. On Friday we got a new AC installed and now it feels like a proper Autumn outside. I don't even mind the irony because I love this weather so much!
\n\n\nI probably already mentioned that I wanted to make some tree trunks and that I bought some very bright fabric from Remainders to do so. They turned out pretty good! I made eight in total and tried three different techniques, and by the end I feel like I really had it figured out. They are pretty flimsy but between the 1x2 wooden armature, the glued-together curved cardboard, the spray-adhesived paper skins, and the sewn fabric sleeves, I think they'll last two weeks outdoors in LA. If they don't, I'll try something better next year.
\n![\"Half](\"/assets/blog/week-in-review-41/tree-trunks.jpg\")
\n\nMid-way through building the trees I finally bought some electric scissors. It's like a rotary cutter but battery-powered, and it cuts clean straight lines through corrugated cardboard in no time with no effort. I weep for the hours and hours I spent ten years ago, crouched on the ground, carefully measuring and cutting strips of cardboard with a ruler and a box cutter. This thing was $30 at Harbor Freight. I should have bought it then! I am trying to be less frugal when it comes to tools and art supplies because I am making my life harder for no reason, but it's really hard. Even when I was making the trees, which are made entirely of scraps I already had (apart from the $6 of fabric I bought at Remainders), I was setting aside the "good" cardboard and wood for some theoretical future project. I gotta quit it!
\nPart of the frugal compulsion is that I keep everything. It's not quite hoarding, but it does mean there are half a dozen boxes in the garage full of things that I've never used and never will use. But sometimes I do use some of those things, you know? I ventured into the loft in the garage and pulled out all the pieces from past Halloweens that I couldn't bear to throw away, and there's a lot I didn't know I still had.
\n![\"A](\"/assets/blog/week-in-review-41/critters.jpg\")
\n\nThis is all going in the yard this year! Since I dropped my arbitary requirement that I start from scratch on a new installation every year this year, I have also given myself the freedom to mix things together. Some of these are very different art styles from each other but that probably doesn't matter! Let's fill the dang thing up and see what happens!
\nAnd so I've started setting up the yard for Halloween. I've given myself a few days to put things in place, rather than trying to transform the yard overnight for no reason. Currently, the backdrop supports and the batten-hung canvases are set up and weighed down, and all the extension cords and half the lights are in place. Tomorrow, the stretched canvases and the new trees go in place. Friday and Saturday I install all the critters and creatures and do some touch-up painting, and then we're live for the season!
\nAmy and I observed the reason for the season this week when we went to our friends' house and we spent some time carving pumpkins together. It was a lot of fun! I gave mine eyebrows.
\n![\"Four](\"/assets/blog/week-in-review-41/pumpkins.jpg\")
\n\nThis time next week, things will be up and running and I'll be hopefully a little more relaxed. I gave myself some grace on finishing the little musician guys, so I'm leaving room for them in the yard to be installed some time between Saturday and Halloween. More on them soon I sure hope!
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-15T02:15:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-40", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-40","title": "Week in Review #40: Scream Squad", "content_html": ""Scream Squad" is a term that Universal Studios has half-heartedly try to get people to use organically to describe the friends they attend Halloween Horror Nights with. They also frequently use the tagline "Never go alone." I get that it's playing into horror movie tropes but it also feels so desperate to me. It reminds me of this ad campaign for this scary/ridiculous movie I won't be seeing called Whalefall, which implores its audience to see it "on the biggest screen possible."
\nAnyway I am hard-pressed to pass up ironic use of a tortured marketing phrase, and on Friday I met up with my #ScreamSquad for Halloween Horror Nights™ at Universal Studios® Hollywood. We had a great time! This was my third or fourth time going and it was my favorite edition yet. I've learned how to not get too anxious walking into a maze, and to use the extremely dense traffic to my advantage to avoid being too close to any of the jumpscares, so I can focus on the set design. It makes the times when they really get me all the more satisfying. The highlight this year was their adaption of Sinners, which did some interesting stuff with LED light eyeballs that I haven't seen before and I'm still not sure how they pulled it off. There were also a couple original-IP houses whose designs were as excited as their names were cringey: Dead Deader Deadest and Killcenañera. Big puppets! Cool sound design! Intricate sets you can touch if you're slick about it! I love this stuff!
\nTwo members of my #screamsquad are getting married in a couple weeks which makes it more complicated for us to visit other haunts, but I'm planning to try to make time for Knott's Scary Farm and maybe also maybe the LA Haunted Hayride and also FrightFest at Six Flags Magic Mountain. One of those is in Griffith Park and I could basically walk to it, but the other two are an hour's drive away, but I gotta do it! Even if I gotta go alone! #NeverGoAlone! Whalefall!
\nThe rest of this week has been eaten alive by the same project that devoured last week, but I did finally get started on my spooky colorful trees for the yard. They look like shit so far but I think I might be able to salvage them. No photos yet because they look like shit.
\nPer my Southern California Haunt List listing, my haunt premieres ten days from today. I am so nervous about it lol I have so much to do lol smh
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-08T01:47:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/microblog/1791315180", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/microblog/1791315180", "content_html": "I like this essay from Baldur Bjarnason: Software developers are not okay
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-06T19:33:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-39", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-39","title": "Week in Review #39: Time Warp 2", "content_html": "It's been a week since the end of the week I'm reviewing. That stinks! I've been too busy! I wish I could say I've been busy with fun stuff, like building my Halloween show, but no.
\nOn Sunday night we went to Palm Springs. The Ace Hotel put on a big promotion and we are easy marks for that shit. It was kind of gloomy weather which is probably why their rates were so discounted, but I sat by the pool and read some Instapaper articles and then had a mai tai at Bootlegger, so I am not complaining.
\nAnd then the next few days were just absolutely devoured by some work that I can't even talk about goddamn. Bye!
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-01T01:36:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-38", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-38","title": "Week in Review #38: Time warp","image": "https://johnholdun.com/assets/blog/week-in-review-38/toucan2-crop.jpg", "content_html": "It's been almost a week since the week that I'm reviewing ended. I've been busy for annoying and not-blog-relevant reasons!
\nOnce cool thing I can share is this toucan:
\nIt still needs more paint, I'm not convinced that these are the colors yet, and some parts that are flapping around need to be glued down, but I'm quite pleased with it. I think it is maybe the best thing I have made.
\nTrying to remember what else happened a fortnight ago…I rode the LA Metro for the second time! (The first time was almost twenty years ago wow). I went to a screening of The King of Comedy at the Academy Museum, and to avoid the unpredictable parking in that area I drove to Union Station and took the D from there. It was cool! Not as cool as the Minneapolis metro unfortunately.
\nI also went to Bob Baker Day with the fam and had a great time. It's the biggest and most crowded I've ever seen it. The Halloween show at the Bob Baker Marionette theater is completely sold out for the season, and their last show completely sold out as well. Nice problems to have! I'm still sore that I missed my opportunity to see the new train show though.
\nI saw two shows at the Elysian theater this weekend: Bizarre Bazaar and Famous People Improv. The latter is a long-form improv show as you might imagine (this time featuring stories from Fiona Dourif of The Pitt, which was a draw tbh); the former is a clown-focused variety show I've seen a few times that always gets me excited about performance afterwards. I've thrown a few new ideas at the live show idea I started really thinking about in January and keep alluding to. This is vague but none of it is really worthy of explication right now I think.
\nWednesday night we saw Robyn at the Forum! She put on a really great show but the highlight for me was an introduction to her opener, who is a DJ/producer/performer called horsegiirL who is a horse and writes horse music. Big recommend.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-23T17:10:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-37", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-37","title": "Week in Review #37: Minneapolis and a marching band", "content_html": "Last Wednesday we flew from Paris to Minneapolis via Amsterdam. It was a during-the-day flight traveling West so I (attempted to) stay awake for (most of) the whole flight. Neither of us really had too much trouble with jet lag this whole trip! A blessing.
\nI frankly didn't have high hopes for Minneapolis—we were headed there for an event Amy was invited to attend, it was convenient to attach it to the end of this Europe trip, and we figured we'd make the most of it. But it was kinda great!
\nA strong introduction: the Minneapolis/St. Paul transit system is terrific. We got on a train from the terminal that took us to right outside our hotel in downtown Minneapolis. It was clean and fast and well-lit and well-used! We never ended up on a bus but used the train for like half a dozen trips in the three days we were there.
\nSome highlights included excellent food at Diane's Place and Billy Sushi; an excellent curation and presentation of art at the The Walker Art Center (sans an exhibit that made use of AI for some fucking reason but at least they admitted it); a quick stroll past the remains of the Third Precinct station en route to Moon Palace Books; and live jazz at Berlin. We had fully set Minneapolis up for failure by setting it next to Paris, but it held its own. Good job!
\nAlso of course there was the Mall of America. I spent a whole day there while Amy had other stuff to do and I loved it. Taking a nice train to a huge mall? What could be better? To be honest I thought it would be bigger but I still think they did a good job. Good job, Mall of America.
\nThe second half of the week we were back at home and I did not work on Halloween at all, which felt extremely bad, but I have been catching up on other things I shirked during our excursion. Also, I had to practice some music to participate in Freak March, a giant puppet parade hosted by Freak Nature Puppets on the USC campus.
\n![\"A](\"https://johnholdun.com/assets/blog/week-in-review-37/freak-march.jpg\")
I played trumpet in a little marching band! We were not good but we all had a lot of fun. I was one of I think four winds (including two clarinets and a flute), and all of us had the same experience where this was basically the first time we were playing our instruments in twenty years. I am so eager to get back in to music after Halloween!
\nBut now we're back to life, back to reality, and I need to finish that animatronic parrot I started building two weeks ago. Do you remember that? I barely do!
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-17T16:37:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-36", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-36","title": "Week in Review #36: London and Paris", "content_html": "London! It was my first time in the UK and Amy's too; we spent a couple days here. We stayed in Shoreditch, which seemed cool before we arrived and felt like it was swarming with tech people once we were there. I did not care for that, though I did find points north quite lovely. I bought a 7" single of "I'm a Cuckoo" at a used record shop in Hackney, and now I ought to buy a record player so I can listen to it.
\nWe saw theater every night of our London stay:
\nThe Oresteia, a modern adaptation by Simon Stone, had a lot of very impressive performances and an excellent fish bowl-like rotating set but was too long. I understand you're adapting a trilogy; you don't not need to make it three acts in three hours.
\nMy Neighbor Totoro was conversely a perfect adaptation. Every choice, every moment felt like exactly what a staged version of that film should be, like there were zero compromises in adjusting from screen to stage. I would see this again and I'm eager to see what else this creative team can do. There's a Spirited Away stage show that I think is coming to the US next year, and if that's put on by the same people I will be there!
\nThe Story, a re-staging of a 2003 American play, felt irresponsible. I'm not really sure what point the playwright nor the director were trying to make in staging this. I won't dwell on my criticisms of this because it made me angry! The one saving grace is that I bought a bunch of books on puppetry and immersive theater in the bookshop at the National Theater after the show.
\nWe also learned that every theater in London serves ice cream? That is just a thing they do? It's nice. On our last day in the city I had fish and chips at a pub and it was exactly what I hoped it would be.
\nThen we took the Eurostar to Paris! This was our third time in Paris and it's just…I fuckin love Paris. It's probably my favorite city in the world. I feel so nice there, and the buildings and streets are so nice, and everybody is so pretty.
\nI took half a day from the Paris part of our trip to visit Disneyland Paris, obviously. This was my second time at les parcs Disneyland. The first time, a couple years ago, was during a time when the second gate was under intense redevelopment and the few available attractions were caked with temporary construction walls. Those walls are down now, and the newly-renamed Disney Adventure World is "open," but it's still largely open space? I walked maybe half an hour past towering cranes to catch a glimpse of robotic Olaf.
\nBut Disneyland Paris, the original/primary park, the castle park, is great. It's lacking on paper compared to Disneyland Anaheim, but it's a really nice hang. I don't think it ever gets terribly crowded, and it offers so many spaces to sit and linger and take in the environment, which is my favorite thing to do in a carefully-planned space like this. It certainly takes a cue from Paris in that regard.
\nI also realized that I think Paris's version of Pirates of the Caribbean is my favorite version. I have no idea if a person with a normal understanding of this ride and its versions around the world would actually notice the differences—I think they would if they rode them back-to-back—but the big change is that they tell the story in order, starting with the pirates sacking the village and ending with them as skeletons amid their treasures. It's a little less poetic than the looping/time-travel morality play design of the original, but I have come to think that it is a lot more successful and thrilling. I'm as shocked as you are about this.
\nThis is a bit abbreviated because I'm writing it a few days in the future. I think the only time I pulled my laptop out of my bag on this whole trip was to watch Taskmaster in the hotel room. On Wednesday we flew back to the states, specifically to Minneapolis for a few days. I'll leave this entry here as is the law of blogging but I'll give you a little preview of what's to come: Minneapolis rocks?
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-09T19:46:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-35", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-35","title": "Week in Review #35: Mechanical Bird","image": "https://johnholdun.com/assets/blog/week-in-review-35/toucan.jpg", "content_html": "Friday was my birthday! I spent the early hours taking another trip to Remainders, picking up some interesting free junk and also buying a lot of very bright fabric. I picked out three or four bundles of the most highlighter-y colors I could find. I was worried I was going overboard but it cost like five and a half dollars! I haven't even unrolled these yet to see how much I actually have but it seems like plenty for what I'll use them for: sewing extremely long tubes starting at 8" in diameter and tapering down, which I can then streeetch over some wooden/cardboard branches and add some more non-realistic and dimensional elements to the show. I haven't built those branches yet but I will in the coming weeks.
\nFriday night we went to an escape room! Specifically Wizard's Treasure at 60OUT Hollywood. It was Amy's first escape room ever and my first in maybe a decade. We had fun! It was an extremely easy one; for just the two of us we were finished in about thirty minutes. But the puzzles had some really impressive technology, there was only one literal lock-and-key puzzle in the whole thing and it made sense thematically, and the set was quite elaborate. Certainly and unfortunately not the most elaborately-designed room I've escaped, but I've set the bar very high over the years.
\nI had a scary thought after escaping Wizard's Treasure, and the thought was: there is nothing I just experienced that I couldn't have created myself. I unfortunately gotta think seriously about creating an escape room now.
\nSaturday we saw David Byrne at the Hollywood Bowl and he was excellent. This was, I think, the fourth time I've seen him before. The first time, at the one Roots Picnic that happened in New York, he exclusively performed acoustic songs from his work-in-progress musical about Joan of Arc. (Mixed reactions from the crowd.) The other three, including at Panorama Festival and on Broadway, have been roughly the same format, band members entering and exiting with marching band-style instrument apparati and unseen wireless mics, constantly moving and dancing and wiggling. It's a terrific experience and, to my knowledge, no one else does it quite like this. There was also an enormous series of video screens making up the backdrop, including the floor, which they used to great effect. During one song that introduced the band, they had fake circle shadows on the ground that included floating nametags, and as they moved around the stage their little markers followed them (or vice versa?) It was very video gamey and delightful. I would love to see the technical setup, but I would guess that it's really simple, and everything is pre-choreographed so the video and the band's movements synchronize naturally without any kind of tracking. Great show!
\nSunday was the final class for my immersive production deep dive and I'm sad to see it go. I learned a whole lot and have a much better sense now of how I might fit into a larger team building a piece of themed entertainment or immersive theater, as well as relationships with a dozen or so possible future collaborators. (We all exchanged info so some of you might actually be reading this blog post. Hello!)
\nFinally, here's the latest on Halloween construction. I motorized the toucan!
\nI spent many days and hours diagramming and pondering how to create cam-based pan/tilt control, and I landed on a few plausible mechanisms, but ultimately I went with something much simpler and less sophisticated: there's a four-bar linkage attached by hinges to a bar, and an extension on the lower horizontal piece serves as a control arm that can pivot left/right and up/down. That's then attached with some loose connections to a lever that is attached to a motor, and the motor periodically rotates clockwise or counterclockwise in a repeating program. (I'll take some photos of this mechanism when the prop is complete.) This leads to some unpredictable, natural-ish movements. I can't use this setup to make the toucan look in a specific direction at a specific time, for example, but this particular figure never needed to do anything like that, so I'm keeping it simple! The whole thing will be painted purple and yellow, sort of in keeping with last year's lemurs (who will return this year), and the big gap in the neck will be covered with some loose fringed felt. It'll also get some tail feathers and feet grasping a big long branch. Maybe one of the bright branches I make with that new fabric.
\nBut none of that happens this week, because in a couple hours we head to the airport en route for London! Bon voyage to me!
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-02T18:13:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-34", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-34","title": "Week in Review #34: Painted Babies","image": "https://johnholdun.com/assets/blog/week-in-review-34/bell.jpg", "content_html": "Hello blog. This past weekend I went to Knott's Berry Farm to check out Ghost Town Alive!, their annual summer event. It's sort of a light larp, it's sort of improvisational site-specific theater, it's extremely delightful! Todd Martens's LA Times column covered it a few months ago and describes the whole thing better than I can. I was there by myself and wasn't sure what to expect, so I didn't opt in to any of the interactive stuff, but I hooted and hollered through the variety show and observed a couple of the games and even ended up chatting a little with some of the townsfolk. Then I ate a hot dog while people gathered to vote for the fate of the town after some recent local news upset the status quo. It was dramatic!
\nThis hot dog was fine. I had to get one in before the end of Hot Daugust.
\nThe events culminated around 4pm, after which I took a walk through the rest of the park. Bear-y Tales was open and I rode that for the first time—every other time I've visited the park, it was down for repairs. Indeed it went down this time too, just as I took a seat in a ride vehicle, and I had to wait another fifteen minutes or so by the exit before it was operational again. When I finally sat down again, I saw this lol:
\nLuckily I was alone in the vehicle so I just used the blaster next to it. (I really hate when dark rides incorporate blasters. I find it so annoying. A topic for another time.)
\nThe next day was the third installment of the Immersive Producers series which was all about playtesting. For the second half of the day we were split up into groups and asked to run a low-fidelity escape room-esque puzzle for other members of the workshop, then tweak it based on their experiences for another group to try. It was thrilling! The puzzles amounted to paper printouts and household items, and effects were just explained out loud (i.e. "wow, a cabinet just opened over here!" and then presenting another sheet of paper). It was all extremely effective and made it really easy for us to adjust things on the fly when they weren't working or weren't as clear as we hoped they would be. Lots of overlap with TTRPGs, lots of overlap with UX user testing and paper prototypes, lots of making my brain light up in all sorts of fascinating and novel patterns.. I've never thought too deeply about designing an escape room but this process really got me pondering…
\nOn Sunday night, some friends came over and I showed them how my Halloween construction is going. I fetched the characters I've been building from the garage and referred to them as "my babies." Everyone agreed that that sucked (including me) and unfortunately I haven't been able to stop calling them that.
\nYou might remember that I posed my babies in front of a placeholder backdrop last week. You might also remember that at the time, I hadn't decided what I wanted them to look like. So I took the photo I shared and started painting over it in Procreate. That got me here:
\nKind of interesting? Smoothing out all the visible joints helped the figures read as animals, and giving them furry bodies with different textures and styles of hair was fun. I also think it's cute that they're all wearing boots. I sat with this version of the painting for a day or so and then gave it another pass:
\nYeah! More cohesive, now they all feel like the same species. I had forgotten about ears, so now they have ears. I also spaced them out a little from where they were placed in the original photo and put some more time into thinking about the places they're standing. With this blueish color scheme and some textures in mind, I took a trip to Remainders in Pasadena.
\nI love Remainders so much. It's like a thrift store that exclusively sells scraps and offcuts and leftovers for crafting, all kinds of yarn and fabric and buttons and ribbons and rubber stamps and bottles of glue and stencils and crayons and it's all so cheap! I grabbed basically whatever looked interesting and spent less than $10 on all of it:
\nI also found these little bells (pictured in the center of the stash) which look so cute and might work better than a triangle. They also sound really nice, so I might try to use a real thing striking a real bell in place of a bell-like sound coming out of a speaker.
\nAnyway, lots of placing and cutting and gluing and trimming and painting later and we've got this! Look at my babies!!!!
\nI used the paintings I made as a loose reference but didn't worry about following them too closely. Instead I just let the materials guide me and made lots of decisions on the fly. I've still got plenty of adjustments to make and areas where paint or fabric need to be touched up, but these are more than finished enough to just let them be like this for a while and see how I feel about them over time.
\nHere are some close-ups of each character:
\nThe craft foam ears give them so much personality, and I'm very pleased with the level of detail I was able to achieve on the faces. That's thanks to a very cheap set of acrylic markers, which as you might be able to guess are acrylic paint in felt-tip markers. I am way better with a marker than with a brush. This is my first time using them and it opens up a lot of options for the future!
\nI still have to finish their instruments and build the environment around them, but the next biggest thing is to give them some motion, so that's what I will work on this week! I also want to revisit the toucan; setting it aside allowed me to figure out a better way to go about motorizing it.
\nWe leave for London next Wednesday so I gotta maximize my hands-on baby time until then. God that phrasing really sucks. Should I stop calling them babies? Sound off in the comments below.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-27T00:30:00+00:00" }, { "id": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-33", "url": "https://johnholdun.com/articles/week-in-review-33","title": "Week in Review #33: Clay","image": "https://johnholdun.com/assets/blog/week-in-review-33/clay-faces.jpg", "content_html": "I rolled credits on Big Walk on Monday. It was astonishing. I'm really excited to get into the post-game challenges, and I'm also eager to play the whole thing again with different groups of people! (Let me know if you want to play!)
\nOn Saturday I started something I was putting off because I was scared of it: sculpting the faces for the characters in my show out of modeling clay. It ended up being a really quick and pleasant experience:
\nThese were covered in plastic wrap and then paper mache shortly after sculpting, so they didn't need to be very detailed. I was able to focus on the big forms and features and think more about the contrast between each one. This clay doesn't dry, so after the paper mache was solid I could pull it all out and throw it back in the tub for next time.
\nI loved this process! It was faster and more fun than doing the same thing using my Blender-to-papercraft technique. I think I'm starting to see how these techniques fit together: papercraft for the largest, broadest forms; modeling clay molds for one-off pieces with moderate detail; air-dry clay applied directly to paper clay for the finest details. (Not sure these characters will need that last step.)
\nI spent a couple days laying paper mache over these, making some crude paper clay out of mashed-up brown paper bags mixed with wood glue and joint compound, applying that clay to the inside of the faces to give them some strength and thickness, filling the rest of the void with paper, attaching them to the previously-formed head backs with masking tape; then covering over everything with one more monolithic layer of paper mache. I didn't really take any photos of these intermediate steps. I generally left the pieces on a table outside so they could dry in the sun, but I had one unexpected final step on the heads to repair some damage from raccoons that found the otherwise-finished pieces overnight:
\nLucky the damage was minor and easy to fix. Imagine if one of them ran away with one of these pieces?
\nWhile I was making batches of wheatpaste I was also working on the toucan. No photos of that either because it's not visually interesting yet, but I separated the head from the body and reinforced both parts at the cuts. I added a wooden armature to the head that I could mount to servos and it turned out to be way too heavy, so I had to backtrack a bit. Here's a servo setup I was trying, using two push arms that would lift and tilt the head. You can also see the parts of the toucan in the background, actually:
\nIt's very very janky, and in fact is too janky to be reliable, so I am starting over on the bird mechanism, probably using a simpler pan/tilt design. I'll also need to be careful about adding some weights to the bird head so that its center of mass is above the neck but also so the whole thing is not too heavy. (How do real toucans do this? Do they have amazing neck muscles?)
\nEverything is dry on the bandmates so I plugged all their parts together again and set them up for the first time!
\nWow! Can't remember how much of this I've described before but the one on the left is strumming a washtub bass, the one on the lower-right is tooting a clarinet-like horn, and the top/centerish one is very self-important and tings a triangle intermittently. I'm pleased enough I think! Also, for scale reference, the green backdrop behind them is two feet wide by three feet tall. I've blocked them all out here with boxes and junk from around the garage. I'm not sure exactly what their ground is going to be. Rocks? Branches? Dunno! But I expect to keep them in roughly this composition, maybe spaced out a bit more. This very vertical arrangement was inspired by some of the later scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland; last time I rode it, I was shocked by how much elevation there is in some of the blocking.
\nI ought to space out the players a bit front-to-back as well to give them some parallax. These critters will be staged "within" the show, only just barely visible from the sidewalk, encouraging people to approach the house a bit and take a look at things from another angle.
\nI'm also still deciding how to decorate them. In my original sketches they have big bushy eyebrows that cover their eyes, which I'm excited to add. I might continue this and give them fur on their arms and legs, sort of evoking a fringed jacket? It'd do a lot to smooth out some of the rough transitions between the body parts.
\nSpeaking of, a couple days ago I realized a much more effective way to construct this kind of character, using techniques I had considered and then disregarded from Jimmy Grimes's Puppet Mechanisms and how to make them. Next time…
\nFor now, I think I want to see this band scene through and set aside the toucan because it is frustrating me. Painting and mounting the musicians would feel really great and be very fun to show off, so that's the focus for this week!
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-20T17:27:00+00:00" } ] }