Big smiles on TLN shoot

Well the commercial shoot has been completed and it was an amazing experience for a variety of reasons. The series of commercials is part of a Dental Medical Clinic (owned and operated by Dr. Nelly and Simha Mendelsson) and TLN joint project. The ideas was to help create a series of commercials that served to educate and promote "Dental Med" and its services.

Like with most projects I have done, the challenges on this project were excellent learning opportunities. I had the opportunity to work with some amazingly creative people. The director for the shoot was Jaime Escallon-Buraglia. A young and talented director who has produced and directed a variety of projects including a well received documentary titled "Sanctuary", which has been aired on CBC's Momentum documentary series. Jaime has worked with such companies and organizations as TV Ontario, OMNI TV, The National Film Board of Canada, Bravo!Fact, CBC and TLN. I look forward to the opportunity of working with Jaime again in the future.



This shoot was unique in that the voice for Tino was chosen to be a talented Colombian actor by the name of Carlos Congote. A well known actor in Colombia, Carlos has started to do work in Canada and cretead a wonderful personality for our little friend Tino.

The obvious challenges for the shoot were, first that Carlos was a voice actor and not a puppeteer. Second, I was a puppeteer (and a voice actor), but I didn't speak fluent Spanish. And third, it was decided that live recordings offered a greater amount of impact than pre-recorded voice tracks.

The solutions was this. Carlos was to be set up on location with a script and mic. I was to do puppeteering by listening to Carlos' live dialogue and try to lip sync the puppet with him as we both performed live.



The result was nothing short of amazingly challenging and wonderfully exciting. I needed to sync my puppet's mouth movements (as well as puppeteer the rest of the puppet) to a live actor, speaking Spanish, that (due to live performances) had slight variances each time. I was ultimately happy with the shoot and all those involved had a lot of fun. I am waiting to see the final commercials and I hope that when I see them I will not bee too hard on myself. After all, how many people can say they have done this type of puppeteering?