There's a first time for everything

One of the duties while on tour is to do various forms of media promotions in each city. They rotate the assignments so not any one person is 'stuck' with it. Don't get me wrong, when I say stuck, it's not negatively ~ I love doing media. It gives me a chance to talk about what I do, and I could go on and on if they let me!

Last week was my turn, and my first while on this tour. The interview with the Albany Gazette came out today and I was pleasantly surprised. Usually you do a 15 min interview and you're lucky if you get one or two lines quoted. This piece is mainly me!!

Albany Gazette:

Enabling dinosaurs to move is big job for puppeteers
Thursday, June 18, 2009
By Brian McElhiney (Contact)Gazette Reporter

In "Walking With Dinosaurs," puppets of the prehistoric animals are built to scale.

As a little girl, Kari Klein used to play with a small plastic Ankylosaurus toy. Now, she gets to play the part of the heavily armored, turtle-like dinosaur every night.
That is, she and two other puppeteers are responsible for bringing a life-sized puppet of the dinosaur to life as part of the “Walking With Dinosaurs” show, which has been touring the U.S. since the summer of 2007. Now starting its third year on the road, the tour has been stationed at Albany’s Times Union Center since Wednesday night, with shows running through Sunday.
The U.S. tour is scheduled to run through 2010, with a yearlong European tour on tap for next year as well.
“Nothing like this exists anywhere, or ever has; this isn’t Walt Disney hand puppets, ‘The Muppet Show’ or ‘Sesame Street,’ ” Klein said during a recent phone interview from a tour stop in Rochester. “These are giant, one-to-one scale dinosaurs based off of skeletons. It’s an incredible, incredible show.”
Based on the 1999 BBC television series of the same name, which later aired on the Discovery Channel in the U.S., “Walking With Dinosaurs” features 15 life-size dinosaur puppets representing 10 different species. The 10 large dinosaurs in the show, including a 23-foot tall, 42-foot long Tyrannosaurus rex, move around the stage through the use of a hidden carriage controlled by a driver, while the five small dinosaurs are suits operated by puppeteers.
But the dinosaurs don’t simply stomp around the stage. Like the BBC series, the show features an actual narrative that follows the different dinosaur species’ evolution from the origins of the giant reptiles in the Triassic period to their extinction during the Cretaceous period roughly 65 million years ago. An actor portraying fictitious paleontologist Huxley narrates the action in the show (and, standing beside the dinosaurs, also serves to remind the audience that yes, these animals were huge).
The show originated in Australia in 2007 as the brainchild of entrepreneur Bruce Mactaggart. Klein, a Michigan native with stage puppetry experience ranging from “Legend of the Lion King” to the Jim Henson Company’s “Bear in the Big Blue House,” first heard about the Australian version when a friend sent her a YouTube video of the dinosaurs being built.
“I knew it was something being created and planned over in Australia, and I thought, ‘Do I have to move to Australia now, because this is awesome?’ ” Klein said. “And then I was watching ‘The Today Show’ a month or two later, and all of a sudden the baby T-rex [one of the suit puppets] is on the show, and they’re announcing the start of the American tour.”
Klein sent a letter and résumé to the production, but didn’t hear anything back for about a year. She got the call last year, when the show was looking for new puppeteers for the end of the year, and after an audition a month later she was in.
“I’m happy to say that this summer, the friend that sent me the video will get to see me in the show for the first time,” Klein said.
Klein works with a three-person team to bring three of the show’s large dinosaurs to life — the Plateosaurus, the first of the show’s large dinos; the carnivorous Allosaurus; and the previously mentioned Ankylosaurus. The puppets operate on a system known as a voodoo rig, so named because each dinosaur’s movements are controlled from afar on a smaller version with the same points of articulation.
“They each have about 25 points of articulation,” Klein said. “You wouldn’t be able to look at [the rig] and think, ‘Oh, that’s a dinosaur,’ but the way that it moves, it moves exactly the same way that the dinosaurs do.”
In addition to the driver on stage, one puppeteer is in charge of “gross” movements, manipulating the rig to make the dinosaur’s head and tail move. Klein is the “auxiliary” puppeteer, in charge of finer eye and mouth movements and sound.
“I have what looks like a really good video game joystick that I pull back on to open the mouth,” Klein said. “The thumb toggle on top of the joystick controls eye movement — up, down, left, right, where the eyes are looking. All the sounds are prerecorded and performed live; they’re stored in a keyboard. When you press on the keyboard and pull on the joystick at the same time, the sounds come from the dinosaurs themselves, and the harder you push the louder the sound will be.”
Before Klein could operate any of the dinosaurs, she had to undergo training rehearsals for five weeks. According to Klein, the dinosaurs’ movements are based on the computer animation used in the BBC series.
“A lot of their animators did a lot of the research for us,” Klein said. “We do take some liberties, because we don’t know exactly how they moved. But this is definitely the closest anybody would get to seeing a real, life-sized dinosaur.”
Because of the puppets’ immense sizes, everything is planned out onstage, leaving little room for the puppeteers to improvise. This took some getting used to for Klein.
“I’m used to doing things more improvised, on the fly,” Klein said. “With this you’re constantly refining, keeping to a very strict regimen. You find little ways here and there to add in your own little flourishes, but for the most part it’s an extremely techinical show.”

In the Voodoo Lounge
The puppeteers work out of what they’ve dubbed the “Voodoo Lounge,” usually on a platform in the back of the arena, above the back seats. This gives the puppeteers a full view of the entire show, and as such, they’re privy to the audience’s reactions to their puppets, as well.
“We can very much hear what they’re saying,” Klein said. “Some of the kids can be a little bit too scared, but when a lot of the dinos enter they get great reactions. Yeah, the T-rex, that’s the big one right there. The Brachiosaurus — the mama Brach is about 36 feet tall; the top of its head is almost hitting some of the lights sometimes.”
The long-necked Brachiosaurus is the biggest puppet in the show, and its size can cause problems sometimes. In fact, at the tour stop in Rochester, the arena’s clearance turned out to be a little bit lower than expected.
“If it’s too low and there’s a risk of a dino hitting anything, we alter our show,” Klein said. “Everything is very meticulously planned out and measured. They’re the stars, so all care is taken so that they can put on the best performances they can.”