IAC logo

The world of non-commercial film and A-V

Events Diary Search
The Film and Video Institute find us on facebook Join us on Facebook

Bookmark and Share

The making of The Grand Sale

The film won a Gold Standard award and the prize for Best Animation.

The Grand Sale is the 13th episode of Willoughby Drive. The idea of making this series came from some stories published weekly in Punch in the nineteen-twenties. These were called Simple Stories and were funny little satirical sketches about very different people, such as a detective, a burglar, an inventor, a brigand and many more. The stories made me laugh and I thought they were too good to lie unread in somebody's attic. So I established my three families to live next door to each other in a suburban road called Willoughby Drive. Then in each episode (except for The Grand Sale) I introduced one of the Punch characters whose coming caused havoc, upset or drama to the lives of the neighbours. The stories are all shot on 16mm film one or two frames at a time and later transferred to video.

Judging the cake competition in 'The Grand Sale'. The thieves in 'The Grand Sale'.

See the connection? The puppets of the cake judge and committee chairwoman doubled as the two thieves.

The team I needed to make the series included voices, a wide variety of craftsmen, a puppet maker, an artist, an editor, a sound man and a good lab.

The voices were no problem since for some years Jonathan Cecil had been giving us his voice for our puppet theatre plays. So for the series he and his wife Anna Sharkey did all the voices - no mean feat as there are 66 different ones.

To find craftsmen who would make houses, doors, windows, furniture and all the other 101 props needed for the sets I roamed round craft fairs and found some amazingly gifted people. They would work in their own homes, sometimes hundreds of miles away, and I would drive round collecting all the work ready to prepare the sets. By the time I started the series Mark, my son, was a wildlife editor working in London, Bristol, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. After his working day or at weekends we did all the editing. So, with the same sound man and the same lab, the team has hardly changed over more than a decade.

Ladies trying on hats in 'The Grand Sale'. The cow in the sale room, from 'The Grand Sale'.

The woman trying on the hat ... doubles as Farmer Bell behind the table. The cow thinks she is the movie's star.

To produce the head of a star puppet involves three stages: the sculpted head; the armature for the moving eyes and mouth; and the moulds. It can take months and many visits to check the stages. I had no new heads for the Grand Sale but a lot of character changes of the same puppets. So the thieves became the chair ladies, the hat lady became Farmer Bell and so on. The parrot was sculpted without his wings which were made separately. Similarly the cow's head was made separate from the body which I had from a previous episode. Both had armatures and moulds.

The Grand Sale had its fair share of trouble but what can you expect with a flying parrot and a cavorting cow?! Surprisingly it was neither the parrot nor the cow that caused the greatest consternation. Admittedly the cow's head fell off in the last scene but it was Mrs Gumble Bump's winning cake that caused the greatest trouble. This cake had to be hollow in order to fill it with cream, jam and cake so that when Mrs Gumble Bump fell on it there would be a good squish. (Not achieved.) All the other ten cakes looked good in the shots but in the editing Mark took one look at Mrs Gumble Bump's cake, now filled and I hoped presentable, and said, "I don't think Mrs Gumble Bump would win the cake competition with this cake."

Still of the cake competition from 'The Grand Sale'. The substandard cake from 'The Grand Sale'.

Mrs. Gumble Bump's first cake - which was not deemed acceptable as competition winner.

Big decision time. All the filming was finished and transferred to video - so do we get another 100 ft of film, go back along the M25 and beg our very busy cake lady to make a replica of the winning cake? (Already filmed.) Well yes she did and I filmed it all again and it was worth it. There are enough things to make one squirm when seeing one's completed film without leaving the winning cake that couldn't have won.

- Tana Fletcher     March 2006

Visit www.dolphinpuppetfilms.co.uk for more about Tana's work.

Editor's note: When we contacted Tana in February she had just had a fall in the London Underground and broken her hip. Despite her injury she wrote this article and managed to get to her studio to organise the illustrations. We are very grateful to her.


Share your passions.

Audience silhouette.

Share your stories.

Page updated on 09 October 2011
Contact Webmaster
Data Privacy
find us on facebook Join us on Facebook
Bookmark and Share
UNICA information UNICA member
Company Limited by Guarantee No. 00269085. Registered Charity No. 260467. Authors' views are not necessarily those of the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers. Website hosted by Merula. JavaScripts by JavaScript Source. Menu by Live Web Institute. Art work by Tony Kendle.