Month: August 2023

It’s amazing what can happen when a skilled artist picks up a chisel or sits down with lump of clay in order to create a silent partner. In my pervious article, I discussed the different types of ventriloquist figures most commonly used today, mainly outlining the differences between soft (material and foam) puppets and traditional/hard (wood or molded) figures. Personally, I have been infatuated with puppets of all kinds for as long as I can remember, but the day I saw my first ventriloquist figure it changed my life forever. I was in third grade, and we had a special performance at school. The performer was a magician and ventriloquist. During the show, he brought his partner, a traditional, hard ventriloquist figure, out on the stage. Suddenly, it was alive. I was mesmerized. The puppet came to life unlike anything I had seen before. And I was hooked. From that day forward, I was on a quest to find, own and learn to manipulate a puppet the way I saw it done on stage that day. It wasn’t until I was in college that I finally got to see and use a professional ventriloquist figure, and that day was also transformational. Today, I am surrounded by figures of all shapes and sizes. My collection has over 30 figures in it, and each one is a unique piece of art. My knowledge of the rich history of this art form only furthers my appreciation for it, as I’m sure it will yours. The first recorded appearance of a ventriloquist figure was reported in 1757 when Austrian performer Baron Von Mengen modified a nutcracker to create a makeshift puppet to use in a performance. Mengen used the “poupee” along with manipulation to give the inanimate object life. However, it’s English ventriloquist Fred Russell that’s considered the father of modern ventriloquism. In the late 1800s, he began performing with a single wise-crackin’, cheeky-boy dummy named “Coster Joe” sitting on his knee. Since that time, figures have evolved quite a bit. These original figures were crude dolls and dummies with grotesque features or simple flat faces painted on wooden boards with hinged mouths manipulated by a single peg. Today, there are an endless number of options. There are figures that look like real people, others that look like creatures and caricatures, and some crafted to resemble animals, aliens and imaginary characters. Essentially, if you can dream it, they can make it. The wooden vent figure was brought to prominence by The Great Lester when he reached the pinnacle of Vaudeville success with his self-carved figure, Frank Byron Jr. But when it comes to the golden age of ventriloquism, it was Frank Marshall who put figure making on the map. Frank Marshall began working at the Mack & Son Woodworking Shop at the age of 13, after The Great Lester brought him to the Mack’s shop to rehab after suffering from Polio. Although Marshall passed away in 1969, he remains the most renowned figure maker in history even to this day. He made famous figures for many legendary ventriloquists, including Jerry Mahoney for Paul Winchell and Danny O’Day for Jimmy Nelson. Today, there are many talented figure makers at the top of their game creating amazing figures for ventriloquists. Conrad Hartz is regarded by many as the modern day Frank Marshall. He creates figures in the Marshall-style and even uses some of Marshall’s personal woodcarving tools to do it. Tim Selberg has for many years held the top slot in the modern figure-making world with his hyper-realistic, doll-like works of art that are sculpted and meticulously painted by Tim’s own hand. His figures are available with lots of mechanical animations and are a top choice for many working professionals. There are many other figure makers who have produced wonderful figures in recent years like Alan Semok, Chuck Jackson, Bill Nelson, Mike Brose, Robert McRay, Albert Alfaro, Brant Gilmer, Dan Lavendar, Kem Poyner, Geoff Felix and Greg Claassen. As well as relative new comers like Mike Palma, Jimmy Eisenberg, Joe LaPenna, Corey Coleman, Jim Manalli, Tyler Ellis and Austin Philips who makes figures in the tradition of Europe’s Marshall, Len Insull. Figure Making Magic

When Magic And Figure Making Merge

What do you get when a sign painter turned commercial artist turned comic book inker turned magic prop builder decides to get into figure building? A new beginning. Enter Chance Wolf. A magic enthusiast who not only collects but also creates magic props. Wolf is a life-long lover of the magical arts and also a child ventriloquist who was bit by the magic bug at age of 12 when he watched an old man make a dollar bill disappear in his bare hands. That same year Chance got his first vent figure (a Jerry Mahoney). After spending over a decade illustrating comic books for Image Comics like Shadowhawk, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spawn the Undead and Spawn just to name a few and eventually being the art assistant to the legendary comic book icon Todd McFarlane, Chance began suffering symptoms of Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. The condition made it too painful for him to work any longer in his dream career, so he was forced to make the difficult decision to leave the comic book world and forge a new path. As a part-time working magician, Wolf had built many custom magic tricks for both his own show as well as for other magicians. That’s when it hit him—maybe he could build magic props for other working magicians. After some research, Chance discovered that many of the props in the children’s magic market were poorly designed and visually outdated by about 50 years. So he embarked on building a business focused on reinventing children’s magic. In early 2003, with the help of his girlfriend and future wife, Shelley, Wolf’s Magic was born. The early days of the company were brutal. The learning curve and 16 hour days never seemed to end. But Chance’s passion for the art and drive to create something truly special pushed them through the grueling months. Within 12 months, they had revolutionized the way children’s magic looked and they way it was performed. He created Willy Wonka-style props with elaborate fun plots that utilized new manufacturing materials resulting in longer lasting, high-quality apparatus for both performers and collectors. The magic community had never seen anything like it. Chance and I became friends in 2012 when I approached him about building a kid’s magic prop I had created. Chance worked with me to bring the effect to life and we marketed and sold it to the magic community at large. Since then, I have consulted with Chance on several magic props and last year we released the sell-out kids effect, The Skunky Munky. Chance and I speak often and over the years I have talked with him about my passion for ventriloquism, my work as a ventriloquist and my collection of figures. I feel like these conversations may have had a small part in motivating Chance to rekindle his love of vent figures and start his figure making journey.

Reinventing Modern Figure Making

Just as he did with children’s magic, Chance is on a quest to reinvent modern figure making. His figure making business model has been designed to avoid the common pitfalls in manufacturing and service while still providing collector quality figures, with professional reliability and excellent customer service and communication. He’s applying the streamlined production process he’s honed for 13 years making magic to building his figure. This allows Wolf Vents to build multiple figures at once but still give them all a unique and custom touch. Chance’s figures are engineered with innovative mechanical designs, utilizing synthetic materials for fabrication of components and intelligent, ergonomic lever positioning. Chance builds with the user in mind and applies an Apple sensibility to the way his creations’ mechanics look and function. Intuitive and user-friendly vent figures? Yes! Even the bodies are a modern version of the classic all wood bodies of yesteryear with a ground-breaking new design that keeps them lightweight yet strong enough to stand on. Most figure makers create a new character head design then simply throw it on a stock body. That’s doesn’t work for Chance. His perspective is that the body design is just as important as the head design. They work in tandem to complete a full vision of a character. Given people have an infinite number of physical characteristics that make them an individual, from weight, height, posture, etc., why not give that same complete uniqueness to a vent figure? Chance has! But what really makes Chance’s figures stand out is his extensive background in illustration. He is able to bring highly original characters to life in his unique comic style that is topped off with a first class paint job. He hand-paints everything with multi-layered airbrush effects. His stock figures come with many features most others would typically charge hundreds extra for. Chance’s feeling is that these “extras” are actually necessary for the best user experience so they come stock on all his figures. Another key concept in Chance’s work is that each figure will have animations that match the character not just a bunch of random animations chosen by the ventriloquist and crammed onto the stick. Chance believes that the character and the animations work in harmony to help the vent create a believable and authentic personality and performance. So he’s restricting the animations that come on each of his figures to only those that add to the character even if it means losing money on the sale of extra animations. This with this thinking in mind, Chance and I have been working to innovate novel animations that bring his characters to life in new ways. By applying the principles of magic and prop building to figure making we’re coming up with some very exciting and revolutionary stuff. Sometimes in life there is a confluence of unique events that creates a rare phenomenon. Something that redefines they way things are looked at, thought about and done. That unlikely event is currently occurring in ventriloquist figure making right now. Leading the charge is Chance Wolf.

A great site design and technical gimmicks are no replacement for developing an interesting, readable writing style. Most of us don’t do much personal writing in our everyday lives or even keep a diary. Writing about yourself is never easy, and you may find yourself freezing up in front of the computer screen or becoming stilted and unnecessarily verbose. Here are a few suggestions you can use to develop your own voice and style for your blog. First, remember that a blog is a conversation. Try to write the way you speak. Avoid jargon and clichés and don’t overuse the thesaurus. It may be helpful to speak your entry out loud before trying to type it or to read it aloud after you’ve written it. If you find yourself struggling as you read aloud or speaking unnaturally, think about what you might have said if you were talking to a friend rather than writing. Second, write your blog with a specific friend or family member in mind. Thinking of someone you know well and who might want to read your blog will help you relax your writing style. That’s why it’s become popular for many people to start personal journal entries with Dear Diary. The goal is to get your writing to sound more like you and less like a lofty essay. Always consider your audience. If you’re writing for only close friends and family, you don’t need to explain that Sarah is your 8-year-old daughter every time you mention her. But if your blog attracts a wider audience, you may want to create references or glossaries to help new readers follow along. Finally, before you start blogging, spend some time visiting other blogs that are like the one you’re thinking of starting. Read one or two for a few weeks and pay attention to things like the length of posts, frequency, writing style, and subject material. You can get some great ideas for your own blog by noting what you find interesting and compelling in other people’s blogs.

UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE

The blogs that attract the most readers are the ones with frequent updates. If you start a blog, be prepared to spend some time working on it every day or two. If you’re going to be a blogger, you have to blog! It takes discipline for most of us to write, even conversationally, every day. If you find yourself dreading posting to your blog, maybe a blog isn’t for you. As you go about your day, keep the blog in the back of your mind. You may even want to carry a notebook where you can jot down reminders for topics you want to blog about later. Start paying attention to the parts of your life that are most interesting to you; those will likely be the areas your friends and family are most interested in as well. Don’t be afraid to write about everyday activities — parking tickets and car repairs — but don’t neglect to talk about what you’re thinking and feeling. All these areas will make it possible for you to update frequently. Having a co-blogger can take some of the pressure off, especially if all authors contribute regularly. If you’re going to be working with several people on one blog, talk over how often you expect each other to post so that you can keep some focus and cohesion to your blog. If you will be updating your blog on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis, try to be consistent about when you add new posts so that your readers know when to catch up. For example, you may choose to update your site every Sunday evening.

INVITE COMMENTS

An important aspect of blogs is that they feature the writing of the blogger as well as the comments of readers. When you visit a blog, you often find a comment link under the text of each blog posting. Clicking that link enables you to read comments from other people and submit your own. Usually bloggers make their own comments in the posts on their site, but sometimes a blogger adds a response in the comment section because it’s a more direct way to address someone else’s comment. Not all bloggers choose to implement the comment feature, but if you want to develop a dialogue with your audience, comments are the best way to do so. The comment feature is an easy way to involve your audience and get valuable feedback about what you’re doing with your blog.

SEO is a master of disguise. It sits on the website, hidden in plain sight of your visitors but staring them straight in the face. It makes itself known to Google, Bing, and other search engines but doesn’t sacrifice your content. The key to generating more leads for your business is optimizing your site for search engines.

Optimize Your Homepage & Inner Content:

Find the right keywords. Filling your website with keywords is vital to gaining the attention of search engines and attracting an audience. But using a bunch of keywords that have a lower search volume is always better than having one keyword with a high one. Use long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are keyword phrases which are specific to your brand or product. Make your website responsive. Creating a website that looks great on desktop but all over the place on other devices isn’t good. Especially when most people are searching on the move nowadays. Make sure your page is sleek in both design and usability for all devices and you’re set.

Capture Every Email:

To improve your lead generation, ask everyone who visits your website to sign up for your email list. Make it easy to subscribe and ask them more than once. Use multiple types of optins to grab attention and capture emails. Lightbox popups: OptinMonster features a lightbox popup that opens when a user shows exit intent (when they’re about to leave the site). It’s extremely effective because it asks every visitor. Sidebar widgets: A prominent sidebar optin is highly visible and will appear on every page. Because many websites have a sidebar optin, visitors who want to subscribe will likely look for an optin there. SEO serves as a map or funnel, bringing a stream of leads to your website, making your website one of the best lead generation tools you have. To make the most of the opportunity, you need to create and optimize quality content so that search engines and searchers see the value in what you offer, and want to sign up or buy.

Bootstrap is a free and an open source framework used for front-end development. It is a responsive, mobile-first and prevailing front-end framework. There are certain predefined classes in Bootstrap, which is useful in front-end development to make the web page perfect and also compatible with all the latest browsers. Here are some important reasons to choose Bootstrap CSS Framework for your website:

Easy to Use:

Bootstrap is a CSS structure with predefined classes for format, which uses its lattice framework, different CSS segments and JavaScript capabilities.

Highly Responsive:

Having a responsive and mobile compatible website becomes compulsory for the growth of your business. A responsive website design process is mostly carried out with the help of CSS framework like Bootstrap, 960 grid and many more.

Grid Framework:

Bootstrap offers 12 – column grid system, layouts and components. You can perceive the number of spots in the grid framework that you may want each column to take part in, with the use of instant classes of Bootstrap.

Customize Bootstrap:

Customized Bootstrap is very useful for your website. It adjusts or customizes as per the designs of your project. Only the web developer needs to make choice to select the required aspects, which are beneficial or related to the website and also turn off the remaining aspects that are not required.

JavaScript Modules and Plugins Integration:

Bootstrap provides numbers of JavaScript plugins and modules to make your website more effective and useful. If you need some functionalities like menu, sliders, drop-down, navbar. Then you don’t need to attempt and test various codings and experiments, just include a few lines code of these plugins and all done in your website.

Appealing website design is the base of every brand’s success! Moreover, just creating such an SEO friendly web design is not enough which can drive any random user. Rather, there should be some premium quality audience heading towards your website. This could be only possible while letting an experienced SEO company do the website design and development for you. However, if you are a pro designer and want to go for your website design by yourself, the following effective tips can be a great help:

Do SEO for images:

When it comes to an SEO friendly website design, make sure that you aren’t choosing very large images. Their standard size must be 30 to 100 kb with a resolution of 72 dpi. If you cross this limit then the too heavy images will make your site load very slowly. And, it can very negatively affect your search engine ranking.

Opt for a user-friendly URL:

It is pretty important to ensure that the URL of your website is user-friendly. Otherwise, it will drastically lose its ranking.You must try limiting categories as much as you can in the link. It directly influences the SEO ranking of your website. Keep in mind that when you require separating words in your URL then hyphens, instead of underscores, have to be added.

Optimize for mobile phones:

Web design and development has expanded its coverage up to a great extent. And, being mobile-friendly tends to be the most important aspect.So, design your website in such a way that it remains in the fingertips of your audience. The more people will head towards your website, the better it will rank in Google.

Use less javascript:

You might think that making use of javascript for designing your entire website is a good idea. But, if you don’t know, the crawlers of search engines move through websites to index them and mark their ranking in the results.

Don’t use too much flash elements:

A huge extent of flash on your website can be pretty distracting for your visitors. Also, it can badly impact your website’s search engine ranking. More than necessary flash in a website has been always devalued and ignored by search engine platforms as it seems to be too disturbing.

A great site design and technical gimmicks are no replacement for developing an interesting, readable writing style. Most of us don’t do much personal writing in our everyday lives or even keep a diary. Writing about yourself is never easy, and you may find yourself freezing up in front of the computer screen or becoming stilted and unnecessarily verbose.

Here are a few suggestions you can use to develop your own voice and style for your blog. First, remember that a blog is a conversation. Try to write the way you speak. Avoid jargon and clichés and don’t overuse the thesaurus. It may be helpful to speak your entry out loud before trying to type it or to read it aloud after you’ve written it. If you find yourself struggling as you read aloud or speaking unnaturally, think about what you might have said if you were talking to a friend rather than writing.

Second, write your blog with a specific friend or family member in mind. Thinking of someone you know well and who might want to read your blog will help you relax your writing style. That’s why it’s become popular for many people to start personal journal entries with Dear Diary. The goal is to get your writing to sound more like you and less like a lofty essay.

Always consider your audience. If you’re writing for only close friends and family, you don’t need to explain that Sarah is your 8-year-old daughter every time you mention her. But if your blog attracts a wider audience, you may want to create references or glossaries to help new readers follow along.

Finally, before you start blogging, spend some time visiting other blogs that are like the one you’re thinking of starting. Read one or two for a few weeks and pay attention to things like the length of posts, frequency, writing style, and subject material. You can get some great ideas for your own blog by noting what you find interesting and compelling in other people’s blogs.

UPDATE, UPDATE, UPDATE

The blogs that attract the most readers are the ones with frequent updates. If you start a blog, be prepared to spend some time working on it every day or two. If you’re going to be a blogger, you have to blog! It takes discipline for most of us to write, even conversationally, every day. If you find yourself dreading posting to your blog, maybe a blog isn’t for you.

As you go about your day, keep the blog in the back of your mind. You may even want to carry a notebook where you can jot down reminders for topics you want to blog about later. Start paying attention to the parts of your life that are most interesting to you; those will likely be the areas your friends and family are most interested in as well. Don’t be afraid to write about everyday activities — parking tickets and car repairs — but don’t neglect to talk about what you’re thinking and feeling. All these areas will make it possible for you to update frequently.

Having a co-blogger can take some of the pressure off, especially if all authors contribute regularly. If you’re going to be working with several people on one blog, talk over how often you expect each other to post so that you can keep some focus and cohesion to your blog.

If you will be updating your blog on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis, try to be consistent about when you add new posts so that your readers know when to catch up. For example, you may choose to update your site every Sunday evening.

INVITE COMMENTS

An important aspect of blogs is that they feature the writing of the blogger as well as the comments of readers. When you visit a blog, you often find a comment link under the text of each blog posting. Clicking that link enables you to read comments from other people and submit your own. Usually bloggers make their own comments in the posts on their site, but sometimes a blogger adds a response in the comment section because it’s a more direct way to address someone else’s comment.

Not all bloggers choose to implement the comment feature, but if you want to develop a dialogue with your audience, comments are the best way to do so. The comment feature is an easy way to involve your audience and get valuable feedback about what you’re doing with your blog.