Johnny Kelly and It’s Nice That talk puppets
Pleased to see director Johnny Kelly‘s interview with It’s Nice That on making puppets for ‘Right on Tracks‘
INT: Was the process for creating these puppets like?
JK: I came up with various scenarios in storyboard form (e.g. a bully slamming someone against a locker, a lonely kid in a canteen, an entire family sitting in a hot tub). I gave the boards to illustration collective Nous Vous, who designed literally hundreds of characters. Working with 72andSunny we made some refinements and worked out who would go where, and then their designs were then handed over to expert puppet maker Andy Gent and his team in Hackney Wick.
Given we were making nearly 100 puppets, there wasn’t enough time to micromanage the execution of every single one, so Andy and his team had relatively free rein as to how each would be interpreted. For example, they’d just finished making Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs and had some hair left over. Andy said, “how do you feel about some of these characters having hair?” He did not have to ask twice.
