Creatures of Beyond the Moon

It’s been 2 years since the beginning this exciting project which consumed Roger completely especially throughout the past year. Due to the enormousness of the project Roger involved Chris and Mia in various capacities within the project. They created 40 creatures in a polyethylene foam rubber (something Roger has been dreaming of doing for quite a number of years now) on a small scale, to finally be up-scaled by 10 students from Austria/Linz.

Why Linz? Because Linz hosts a festival, ‘Klangwolke’, annually in order to bring the people of Linz together. For various reasons Roger got involved in tendering for this creative show for Klangwolke and he got the job.

In December 08 the first 2 students from Linz arrived to each be taught to upscale and build 4 of the creatures and take this knowledge back to Linz and teach the public of Linz to build lots more of these same creatures.

The months which followed brought 8 more students at various intervals to our beautiful surrounding, our cottages (mostly River Sanctuary and Kingfisher), to learn about the creation of a further 4 creatures each, which they then took their new-found knowledge home to Linz to aid many more Linzers in building up to plus minus 600 creatures.

A website was created: http://www.linzcreatures.net/s.net/ where people could watch the progress of the project but mainly to guide the participants through the process re ‘the making of’ and the puppeteering.

The students spent a very intense 14 days mostly working but also playing. Evenings were dedicated to relaxation and delicious food either at home or at one of a variety of restaurants in Wilderness. One day of their stay was dedicated to enjoying the great outdoors and doing something fun.

The real work began once the students had left Beyond the Moon farm to go home. The massive job of doing the step by step’s for each creature with photos and wording as well as the nesting of the patterns onto the computer.

Management was needed in Linz, storage rooms scouted for, workshops had to be created, materials sourced, waterjet-cutting of the designs, people hailed to build and puppeteer etc.

It was a crazy time but well worth it. Roger, Chris and Mia spent quite a bit of time abroad setting up, overseeing, guiding and finishing off the process and finally the day of the show arrived.

Jessica and I were invited to be there to see and be a part of the show on the day, the 5th of September 09. It was a fantastic day with all the hard work paying off. The show was great. The people of Linz were blown away. It was simply amazing.

Due to this long process our beautiful Beyond the Moon venue had its doors closed to all events for quite some time now as it was used for the creatures to live in once they were developed.

We are all gladly back on home turf now and with the completion of Linz09 some new, very exciting projects are appearing on the horizon. More about these at a later stage (top secret at present)!