Maker Faire Bay Area 2024
FOGTOWN: The Puppetry Reimagining of the World's Greatest Detectives
Home: Oregon, United States
Fogtown is an in-development TV series (and videogame!) for the whole family, blending the old-school art of puppetry with the cutting-edge innovations of virtual production. Emulating a small-scale style of the Volume-staged filmmaking used in The Mandalorian, Fogtown uses tools like Blender and the Unreal Engine to mix 3D printed puppets & props with digitally handcrafted environments that evoke the spirit of 1800s London (but reimagined with a cardboard diorama look). At our booth, we'll demonstrate the process of filming scenes for Fogtown and let fairgoers try out our choice-based videogame A Rum Case in Fogtown, featuring branching interactive movie gameplay. If you love The Muppets, Wallace & Gromit, or Sherlock Holmes, we think you'll really enjoy what we're up to!
https://fogtownseries.com
Maker
Fogtown
We're a ragtag bunch of puppeteers, animators, 3D designers, programmers, costumers, fabricators, writers and more — all aligned to bring the heartwarmingly comedic world of Fogtown to life for an audience hungry for adventure and mystery.
What Inspired You to Make This?
When the pandemic shut down our team's existing filmmaking plans, we turned our attention to something that could be done on a tight budget and without a large crew. Inspiration struck when we combined an older idea we'd had for years (a comedic Sherlock Holmes homage) with puppetry, a frontier that was newer for us but one we'd been eager to try. The project snowballed larger and larger as friends (and friends of friends) eagerly jumped aboard the pilot for this ambitious TV series, and we added some blistering new tech into the equation thanks to Unreal Engine making its tools freely available for filmmakers. We quickly found that at our small puppet scale, we could use consumer-grade LED TVs as a stand-in for the LED walls of a Volume stage, without sacrificing the quality needed to tell our story well. When we realized how quickly we could pull off production, inspiration struck to add another venture on top of the TV pilot, and use many of our existing puppet assets and digital environments to make an old-school FMV game (aka an "interactive movie") with simple choice-based gameplay connecting hours of branching video clips together. Despite our love of this intersection of cutting edge tech and the ancient art of puppetry, the number one thing that inspires us with this project is our burning desire to bring something riotously joyful, entertaining and positive into the world, at a time when it may be needed most.
