Eurofurence Information > Feedback

EF24 Pawpet show

(1/6) > >>

Cifer:
I really enjoyed the pawpet show this year! The puppets looked good, the jokes were funny and the acting was solid (all like the years before), but two things have massively improved in my eyes:

1) I liked the plot. Where the previous shows have sometimes felt rather cliche-laden (Ooh, a corrupt church that keeps all knowledge for itself to secure its power! Ooh, a treacherous advisor who tries to take power from the naive ruler!), this one started out in a standard sci-fi setting and used clever subversions to tell its own story. The two evil megacorps? One's evil to the core, the other is morally grey at worst. The disappeared lover below the heroine's family's station? An asshole who just ran away in fear of the consequences. Earth's ominous World Government? Actually able and willing to kill ERG with sufficient proof of misconduct and already in the process of purging corruption at the start of the story. The uncompromising leader who makes the hard choices? Unable to see that some of those choices are completely unnecessary.
And the story managed all that without going too far and making the heroes and their ideals unlikeable for their mistakes - the society of Juno is obviously flawed, but not so much that Earth's rule seems like the necessarily better alternative, to say nothing of ERG's corporate dictatorship. And finally, switching out a classic romantiy love story for a familial one always gets a thumbs-up from me!

2) It toned down the swearing and thus made it more meaningful. Yeah, we're all adults, but dialogue doesn't magically become more engaging when you liberally sprinkle the word 'fuck' across it a few dozen times. It just feels cringey and juvenile. Juno Rising's swears felt appropriate and emphasized the situations.

I'm absolutely looking forward to next year's show!

Suicune:
For me it was just ok-ish. But not because I don't like Sci-Fi.

The stage layouts and characters looked great, as ever.

But I got trouble following the story every now and then. It had some weird jumps and it felt like there were some plotholes. I may have forgotton some things which were said, dunno. I kept stuff together by what I just saw and heard and already knew. But there were still things which I didn't really understand.
The usage of the screens... dunno what to think about that. When you sit in the middle of the front row you hardly see anything anyway and sometimes you simply didn't notice that there was stuff on them.

That the scene change times were kinda long didn't help following the story. Why was that? It felt much longer than last year.
With queing up early to get good seats and the delay we spent 7hrs down there at the end. I grew pretty hungry and low on bloodsugar in the last act, gave me even more trouble to follow. xD

So, yeah, for me it clearly couldn't beat The Skies of Astar.
And I will never ever a able to eat an ice cone again without thinking of that one scene :D

o'wolf:

--- Quote from: Suicune on 28.08.2018, 06:23:09 ---The usage of the screens... dunno what to think about that. When you sit in the middle of the front row you hardly see anything anyway and sometimes you simply didn't notice that there was stuff on them.
--- End quote ---

Indeed, front row is not a very good place to sit at for the pawpet show.


--- Quote ---That the scene change times were kinda long didn't help following the story. Why was that?
--- End quote ---

It was mostly due to too many and too complicated costume changes between scenes. We'll work on that.

Thanks for your feedback!

Kulze:
This years Pawpet was one of the 'weak' ones in my eyes sadly, and it could've been easily remedied.

So, piece by piece:

- Scene changes were a little slow this year, but well, mediocre compared to others.
- One puppeteer was visible fairly often, it seemed like there wasn't put as much care for staying hidden as usual.
- This year the spoken lines were rather clear, it was easy to understand every character without problems, definitely a huge plus as we had other years as well :)
- Lighting and special effects, as well as the ideas behind those were really nice done.
- Technical side, the sound was overmodulated as every year since a while now, which is sad, and shouldn't happen. As well as the common mic problems. For the last, nicely solved though, it was barely noticeable, good job there.
- Story wise though... that was the large problem, and I'll go into detail here with it:

The base of the story was good, as well as the some of the plot-twists revolving around it, so the foundation was solid and better then some of the other shows over the years, just the execution of it was flawed in some major ways. Namely, Lyra was depicted as the main character while it actually was a story about Sina. Lyra didn't have any changes in personality over the course of the play, something which is the basic of the basic, the whole part was pushed onto Sina when it came out that her parents aren't the bad guys. While usually a good story is seen as one where the main character personally starts to realize problems over time (with nudging from others), this time it was Lyra more or less forcing all the changes onto Sina, that felt odd and unfitting.
As a second one, the Stillwaters had a very unbelievable and odd personality. Why would such lovely people start to sell weapons in the first place? They didn't seem like hard business-persons, it didn't fit them.
Another one which was fairly noticeable was Link Kabanshee getting shot without ever having even a minor impact on the play, back at the ship he was... fine, just like that. Bringing him into the hospital because of a shot-wound and snatching the data during that time would've made more sense then pushing a huge ice-cone into his rump - even if it was a fun one :)

All in all for the story, it seemed like nobody even put up the time to proof-read it for plot holes, or people became tired after a while and simply said 'fuck it' sadly. Since the problems were such fundamental ones it seemed like this for me.

As for my personal ranking after seeing 10 pawpet-shows in a row now, this one is on Rank 8, and I hope the feedback points up there help in making the next one as good as EF 14 or 23 where the storyboard was rock-solid through and through. So the ability is definitely there. :)

Ragear:
I Love the PPS, I deeply do and have fond memories ... but one goal to achieve ist to make it 2.5hrs, 3 the very max :)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page