2011

Hello there, welcome to the blog. it's been a while since I updated this, far too long in fact, and it is not for lack of things to put up. I have some new show pictures and model pictures to put up, as well as some prop making and puppet making, but am currently trying to get everything looking a little more tidy with a view to getting a new website organised for 2012. However feel free to look through the previous posts, and to catch up on twitter at @maxdorey and to have a look at my illustartion on the short story blog Tales from the Red Barn, and I will put up some of the slightly raggedy pictures from 2011 as part of my drive to get more regular content to you. Everything is geared towards the graduate Bristol old Vic exhibition in July, and I hope to have moved everything across with new pictures to the new site by then. Until then feel free to get in touch or just look around and look back in the next few weeks.
Happy 2012.

Bristol Festival of Puppetry

Hello there, this week Bristol, the city I am now residing in, is playing host to the Bristol Festival of Puppetry, hosted by the folks at Puppet Place. I urge anyone who is able to to go along and see some great shows that are taking place over the course of the festival, including work by Blind Summit, Pickled Image, Stephen Mottram to name but a few. There are also events such as The Smoking Puppet Cabaret, with new and varied work each night. Also well worth looking into are the exhibitions such as the Ray Harryhausen retrospective at the tobacco factory in association with Aardman Animations. As well as this the Collective known as Rusty Squid are doing workshops, and the Puppet Trail on North street is exhibiting various artists Puppets. I have two puppets in this exhibition myself, The Shark and Squid from 20,000 leagues under the sea so if you are around the Tobacco Factory , then do please pop in to see them up close for yourself, and if you are here from the link there then hello and feel free to leave a comment. I will be updating over the next week or so with information and pictures of bits and pieces I have been working on since January, with some puppet mechanisms and some design work. Until then, thank you for visiting.

RSC USA

Hello, here is a quick post to draw your attention to this amazing Time-lapse of the construction of the RSC's thrust stage within the Park Avenue Armory, as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. Never mind building a set from scratch, but the whole building in an exact replica of stratford is pretty amazing.
For more infromation about the RSC in New York go to http://www.rsc.org.uk/whats-on/new-york/

Door

Here is a quick update of some of the model making I have been doing for the Bristol Old Vic Theatre school course: In this set, making one of the doors for the drawing room model. They were constructed from card and wood on the 1:25 scale, and subsequently painted and sanded to get the worn down effect I was after.




I took the basic design from a stock door from the studio



Mark and cut out the panels...



And add in wood strips between



Using tiny screws for the door handles...







In the final model

Ahoy There

Hello All. Here are some pics of the latest model build I have done for the Bristol Old Vic Theatre school, for'The Cherry Orchard. Although it is not the final final model, which will be improved for the exhibition next year, it gets the idea of the design across.

Filling the void

It's been a busy few months and i've been either drawing, model making, prop building, or puppet making. I had been hoping to update with more pictures of current projects, but will have to wait before updating fully with that set...so as a stopgap, a few pictures of some previous work, some of the production shots from Pinocchio at the Tobacco Factory, and a few of my Illustrations from Tales From The Red Barn, the short story blog from myself and Adam Robinson, have a look at that too...

2011

Hello Everyone
First off, a very happy new year, and welcome to 2011 - if you have been reading the blog and looking for updates, many apologies I haven't updated sooner - I don't want to commit the sin of updating without much to say, so am essentially updating less often when I have things to say - In the time since I last updated, I have completed a small puppet build for Dani Mosiman's show 'Little Polly Puppet' at the Alec Clegg studio in Leeds, which I understand went down very well - Huge thanks to Socks Rolland for her help making the beautiful dresses for the puppet - I think everyone was happy with the results, although for me, I was blending two different styles of puppet making which did work after a fashion, but I'm not sure if I would build in this way again...but still, I’m happy with the product, and the show looked great, pictures below. Also, very excitingly, I had a chance to get down to Bristol to do some prop making for the Tobacco Factory’s production of Pinocchio. I will not be watching the show itself till this weekend, but it has had rave reviews, and I’m very excited to be a part of it. One other great thing was that I got a chance to work with the guys from Green Ginger, who are a company I have admired from afar for a while, and are the creators of Rust amongst many other things, and who are just wonderfully creative and nice fellows who I hope to continue working with in future. All in all, it made for a thoroughly pleasant prop build, and my thanks go out to Pinocchio’s brilliant designer Harriet de Winton for getting me involved.

And so to new projects, the big news is I have just signed on to do a large puppet build over the next few weeks for Beautiful Creatures – it’s very exciting, and will be one of the most technical and artistically challenging builds I have done, so I’m looking forward to the challenge of something complex. I will of course be updating with photo’s drawings and so on, and if I pull my finger out, will get the ‘puppets’ part of the blog updated so it can all be viewed from there…IN the meantime, keep looking for updates, and I look forward to a great 2011!
M