The Making of Strings

Erito regards the unborn baby

This article by Stephen Mottram appears in the current issue of The Puppet Master published by the British Puppet & Model Theatre Guild.

Looking at Strings simply from a puppeteer’s point of view, you can easily overlook some of the most interesting aspects of the film. In my opinion, these are not to do with the construction or manipulation of the puppets. Rather, the magic comes from the camera angles and breathtaking wide shots in which we see distant marionette figures – with their strings disappearing up into the heavens – moving inside beautiful landscapes created by Sven Wichmann. (who also designed Babette’s Feast) The sense of distance in these shots was made by permanently filling the studio with smoke, which we breathed in and out for eleven hours each day, week upon week.

Creating these images was not without pain for the poor puppeteers on the top end of the strings. In order to achieve the wide angles for the camera, the string length of the puppets had to be stretched to the maximum. Since the performance platforms on which we all stood were sometimes suspended 16 feet or more above the sets, and since none of them had a leaning rail – just a sheer drop – we all had to wear heavy and restrictive harnesses like mountaineers, which were clipped onto the platforms themselves wherever we were working. To reach the platforms there was a tiny wire ladder which wafted about in the smoky air of the studio. Climbing up it, felt like a helicopter escape from Apocalypse Now.

Since hot air rises, the fumes from the massive film lights, drying paints and the various chemical products of the smoke machines all found their way up to our hot, sweaty and uncomfortable little world.

However, high above the scurrying work of the set decorators and lighting technicians, there was often a sense of calm up there on the manipulation platforms. From far away down below we could hear the groans of the director, ever anxious about expensive time passing. Meanwhile, in a language that sounded like fish talking, little crises of management ebbed and flowed somewhere far below and seemed not quite to reach those of us forgotten up in the grid.

But Strings is an innovative film. It gave us opportunities to learn new tricks and new ways of approaching puppet manipulation. The marionettes were daily placed into dramatic situations and left to fend for themselves, albeit in our hands of course.

They were thrown into lakes, set fire to, covered in sand and snow, chopped into pieces, they had to climb mountains in blizzards, fight with swords and crossbows, dance in formation and trudge through the desert in large groups. Each new setting gave us new challenges and changed the parameters of our use of the puppets. We had to modify the stringing and weighting of the figures for the underwater scenes and change the controls radically for the dancing and fighting. I think the project forced us to confront a lot of the traditional weaknesses of the string puppet and try to turn some of the limitations to our advantage.

Key to the success of a lot of the innovative marionette use was Joakim Zacho Weylandt, who managed the workshops and led the creative team making the puppets and props for the film. We all rapidly learned to respect his extraordinary craft ability and quick thinking. He liked to listen to Elvis Presley whilst working, so the sound of the workshops is forever fixed in our heads as Heartbreak Hotel.

Another star of the creative team was Mette Eis who painstakingly decorated each puppet – constructed from a variety of plastic and wooden parts – with painted on wood-grain, or gold leaf, or porcelain veined with age and fragility. Quietly, throughout the making of the film she must have painted every part of every puppet. I think her skill and patience made a massive contribution to the look of the film.

Long strings on marionettes present all sort of challenges for the performer. Firstly the strings start to feel like elastic. Then the pull of the puppet is totally downward, unlike a marionette on short strings, where a lot of the control comes from slightly diagonal movements of the strings. The hardest thing to cope with though, is the difficulty of anchoring the marionette to the floor when the feet are hidden from view by the rest of the puppet. When a marionette has short strings, it is intuitive to anchor the puppet to the floor by feeling and exploiting the friction between the floor and the puppet’s feet. But on five metre strings, any friction from the floor is likely to spin the puppet out of control. For us this usually precipitated a loud stream of emphatic Danish with the word CUT prominent within it.

And it is hard to see the effect of any sort of manipulation on a marionette which is 5 metres below the control, so to see a monitor showing a front on view of the puppet is essential. We depended very heavily on miniature TV monitors mounted inside spectacle frames which we wore whilst working in the grid. This showed us a reversed version of the image seen by the camera, so that the picture we saw was like looking in a mirror at what the puppet was doing. But it was very hard to get good movement from a puppet so far away. Sometimes we were lucky, but often the studio air thickened with frustration as shot after shot was rejected for unconvincing action.

Fortunately the close-ups and medium shots could be operated from a lower bridge, where the strings were about one and a half metres long. That was much more manageable, and bits of magic came about, like the scene where Bernd Ogrodnik managed to make a marionette run through trees in a shot which panned through a forest. Of course, the closer we could be to the puppets, the more we could get them to perform properly. 
Some of the very busy scenes, where all hands were on deck with every available puppet, are quite remarkable for the organisation of the hundreds of strings and bulky controls. And then there were the puppeteers’ own bodies, which inconveniently got in the way so often for the poor cameraman – Kim Hattesen. And all the time there was a chaos of monitor cables and electrical equipment which stretched away from the set like spaghetti round an Italian toddler.
And there were exciting moments during the filming, like when a certain puppeteer from the UK, whose anonymity I shall preserve here, fell off the highest bridge and dangled in space like Peter Pan for what seemed like quite a long time until she could be hauled back to safety. And when Sofie Krog was manipulating the Ghrak puppet for the scene at the end of the movie where he is on fire and his strings are burning, the image looked so good through the viewfinder, that the cameraman carried on filming, oblivious of the fact that the fire was also burning Sofie’s hands as they clung to the control of the blazing figure.
So I hope that Strings finds its audience and maybe eventually even a tiny corner in film history as well. It gave us all the chance to work with genuinely talented people on a really innovative project. The months spent in Copenhagen were a very valuable time for me. We lived next door to the zoo and my son, who was then two and a half, still thinks that giraffes and elephants come from Denmark.

Other items in the current issue of the Puppet Master include:
D’Albert Marionettes by Ian Denny
The Inspiration for Shakes vs Shav by Nancy Stone
Remembering Whanny 1883 - 1965 by John Blundall
Puppets go Pentacostal by Pauline Venables
A Journey through ‘The Forest of Bondy’ by Ted Hawkins
Puppetry Websites Round-Up by Michael Dixon
The Rainbow Project –Zambia by Douglas Hayward
Plus news, reviews and much more.
For more information about the Guild go to website at top of RH column --> To join the Guild click on the top centre panel within the proscenium on the Guild home-page.