Spent a couple of days this week working on film and animation sequences for Hansel and Gretel in a pop-up studio at artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ home, Ty Isaf, near Aberystwyth.

We had a lot of shots to get through in limited time so ingenuity and speedy working was needed. Clive had rigged up a large slanted acrylic screen which enabled us to switch quickly from back-lit shots of silhouette puppets made by Peter Lloyd to front-lit sequences of animated dancing Lebkuchen biscuits. We then moved onto filming table-top scenes of  the village, the forest and the witch’s house to project onto a screen on stage during the performance. Experienced filmmaker Pete Telfer was behind the camera which helped enormously and we managed to get a great deal done in two intense but enjoyable days. With the window shutters closed and the film lights on we were enclosed in an otherworldly time out of time but we emerged at the end of each day with a lot of work completed and with the shots working the way we wanted or surprising us in a good way.

This stage adaptation, with words by Simon Armitage and music by Matthew Kaner will be a feast for the eyes and ears and Clive is deftly blending the various visual elements together to create a captivating and enchanting spectacle….

Having limited time puts your on your toes and keeps you focussed. It makes you find solutions quickly without over thinking things and this can lead to better outcomes than if you’d had days to plan every detail. You just have to hang on, keep calm, and go with the flow; a skill I still struggle with a bit!

I’ve been working on some tabletop models for the upcoming Hansel and Gretel stage adaptation touring the UK later year (lots more posts about that to come). Children’s wooden toy building blocks provided the nucleus for developing ideas and designs and I’ve been scouring shops and online sellers for interesting material to work with. The pieces I’m using for the stage production come from a wide variety of sources, from beautiful, hand turned wooden trees made in Sussex to second hand GDR-era toys bought in shops in Berlin. My favourite of these is Onkel Philipp’s Spielzeugwerkstatt, an Aladdin’s cave of second hand toys, and complete with a museum of East German toys in the cellar which you have to squeeze through a cupboard to get to. If I was a kid i’d burst with excitement in here, and well, even at the grand old age of 53 I pretty much let out a squeal when I walked in.

On the floor and under tables there are boxes of wooden blocks and toys. I bought up quite a bit, for just a few euros. These old toys have wonderful, mouthwatering colours, but for my purposes at the moment, everything is getting a coat of monochrome paint and some distressing with a Dremel as the look I want is beaten up old toys, forgotten at the bottom of the toy box or found in a skip.

So, at the moment on my table top I’m having fun creating scenes that I imagine are taking place after i’ve gone to bed; the toys start to move and come alive – very Toy Story. These images are not directly related to the Hansel and Gretel project, but working with the toy blocks for the stage performance has led me down a rabbit hole of exploring the potential this approach opens up and the possibilities are just endless.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with these ideas yet, I’d like to draw from the table top models and see where that goes, it’s just hard to stop playing with them at the moment…