NOTAMAN (puppet) FILM

ANDi, the Automaton Protagonist of NOTAMAN

I have a zillion projects but ‘The Big One’ is a puppet film titled NOTAMAN.

Storyboard image of ANDi in his wok environment, a steel foundry, manipulating heated metal.

NOTAMAN is a steampunk, post-apocalyptic Pinocchio story about a worker-robot who decides becoming human will solve the hole in his heart left by the end of the old world.

It’s NOT a dystopia. This world which used to have millions of worker robots ended in a Great Flame Deluge. Humanity survived, and now, thrive in small anarchic collectivist tribal communities. There are gardens, windmills and peace. But, ANDi is a self-aware being who no-longer knows his place.

Inspirations are: Castle in the Sky, The Iron Giant, Bicentennial Man, Return to Oz and many comics.

Folks have compared it to WALL•e and The Wild Robot but I began working on NOTAMAN in 2007. I used to worry about it overlapping with other known properties but I’m no longer concerned about that.

This will be filmed primarily with marionettes in miniature-sets with stop-motion, table-top, waldo, rod puppets and other old-skool puppetry techniques.

I’m starting this massive project by just building and shooting one scene. This is the set for Dr. Kindery’s office workshop.

Doc Kindery is a Cyberdoc and was a battlefield medic. His workshop shows the two sides of his personality. A man who enjoys a warm cup of tea in a chipped China teacup, with sugar stirred in with a wrench.

I have mountains of design work and iteration. I’ve included a sample here of the process.

I’ll be posting more as the project moves forward into construction of puppets, sets, props and test-footage.