In 2009 as part of my residency for the National Theatre's Watch This Space festival I performed two shows ("Cabin Doors to Manual" and "Walter Knitty") that explored combining puppets and stop-motion animations with a live camera feed simultaneously projected onto a big screen, creating a film on stage in real time. 

 

After developing this technique further during my run at the Barbican in 2010 it seemed the perfect way to tell the story of SOMETHING VERY FAR AWAY, I show I made with Mark Arends and Declan Randell. 

​

Mark is an actor I'd met when I'd been working on Beauty and the Beast and we developed Something Very Far Away together at the National Theatre Studio over a couple of years, with puppeteers and Declan's creative lighting, before it opened in 2012 at the Unicorn Theatre in Southwark.

 

The show returned to the Unicorn a couple of times and also toured throughout Europe and Asia / Australia, and won an off-west end award for best children's show.    

​

Here are some photographs of my puppets, and scroll down for some sketches and storyboards.