This made-for-kids video, Circuit Playground “A is for Ampere” – Episode 1, isn’t your everyday made-for-kids video. DIY electronics shop Adafruit, led by MIT engineer and Adafruit Founder Limor Fried (in the pink hair), has launched a puppet-filled web show to teach kids about electronics. Adults may pick up a thing or two, too. 

via BoingBoing. Thanks, @b1g0af.

The spectacular Catalan street theater company, Sarruga, transforms the Millennium Park in Chicago into a fantasy world, bringing their giant ants, spiders and praying mantises to interact with the public in a larger-than-life show full of light, music and movement. In Insects, Sarruga turns these normally miniscule animals into giants, inverting roles and making humans ten times smaller than the insects.

And no, insects don’t shoot steam, nor do venus fly traps swirl around and bang into things in real life. But! It’s always fascinating to see a scale change — something so small to a larger than life size — especially when people become the smaller swarm in the scene!

From the archives (tho not an insect, but an Arachnid, and still a larger than life puppet of sorts): a massive UK spider puppet!

Collosse – A Wood Tale, directed by Yves Geleyn: a short film about the meeting of a robot marionette and a little bird.

via UFunk.net.

Señor Wences (Wenseslio Moreno) on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1966.

Wences was known for his speed, skill, and grace as a ventriloquist. His stable of characters included Johnny, a childlike face drawn on Wences’ hand, which he would place atop an otherwise headless doll and with whom Wences conversed while switching his voices between Johnny’s falsetto and his own voice at amazing speed. Wences would create Johnny’s face on stage to open his act, placing his thumb next to, and in front of, his bent first finger; the first finger would be the upper lip, and the thumb the lower lip. He used lipstick to draw the lips onto the respective fingers and then drew eyes onto the upper part of the first finger, finishing the effect with a tiny long-haired wig on top of his hand. Flexing the thumb would move the “lips”.

Sounds like a DIY waiting to happen, no? 

The Fine Art of Folding Air is a short piece by filmmaker Catherine Stratton (who made Sutton Clock Shop) that introduces the balloon sculture work of Larry Moss and Kelly Cheatle. Their company, Airigami, specializes in making balloons into almost anything. Really. So. Many. Things.

Thanks, Catherine.