Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1542912
ASIA VIGIL ELLINGTON BRINGS HER TALENT FOR CHARACTER DESIGN TO THE UNIQUE WORLD OF MARIONETTE THEATER. S t ri n g s A t a che d Whether it's drawing, baking, or knitting, Asia Vigil Ellington likes to keep her hands moving, so she often takes on additional projects outside her job as a Character Designer. She especially loves volunteering as a puppet and set Concept Artist for Bob Baker Marionette Theater, the longest continuously running puppet theater in the U.S. Ellington has always been a fan of theater, and as a child she loved The Muppets' TV shows and movies. When she came from the Bay Area to L.A. in 2019 to intern at Disney TVA, where she has worked ever since, she learned about the marionette theater with its rich history of creating puppets for Disneyland and films. Friends who worked there asked if she wanted to help design some new puppets, and she says she found it exciting to be able to stretch her creative muscles. The first step for Ellington is to meet with the theater team, and they explain what they are looking for. The theater, which is a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument, has "a whole library of amazing concept pieces from [its] past," says Ellington. This includes schematics of puppets in all different mediums, from newsprint to gouache on canvas. At times, the team shows Ellington existing puppets for her to study, " to get a grasp of how detailed they could be or what movement [and] emotion they're capable of," she says, adding that she usually does her rough designs on paper first, to get her ideas out faster, and then she refines later digitally. Ellington has worked on projects for the theater's clients and on the long-running show ¡FIESTA!, which originated in the 1960s and has been updated over the years, including Ellington's work on the Día de Muertos scene. She helped design skeleton puppets based on a mood board the team sent with their inspirations, ultimately producing rough color sketches that the fabrication and building teams could reference. Even though her pieces were more conceptual, she still wanted to put thought into how the skeleton puppets could move and emote. Since the skeletons were painted with glow-in-the- dark paint, she also had to consider how they would look in the light versus what would be visible onstage in the dark. One of the skeleton puppets presented a particular challenge for Ellington. The puppeteer makes the puppet jump up onto the seat of a penny-farthing bicycle, and she found that there were technical aspects to consider in the 10 KEYFRAME A F T E R H O U R S