Time Piece
Time Piece
Starting in mid-1964, Jim Henson began work on a side passion project that again speaks to the fact that puppetry not only wasn’t his only form of artistic expression but perhaps wasn’t even his favorite. And if that’s not necessarily the case, it at least underlines his lifelong desire to pursue other forms of storytelling and film-making. At this point, puppetry paid the bills, and he certainly enjoyed it, but he wanted more. He considered himself more of a visual artist and designer than a puppeteer (and interestingly, his later Muppet departures such as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth would wed his love for complex worldbuilding through scenic design and art with the most advanced puppetry the world had ever seen), and in this 8-minute-long short film, which he originally called Time to Go before finally settling on Time Piece, he was able to fully indulge that part of himself.
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Before we reach the next major milestone in Jim Henson’s career there are again a bunch of smaller projects to cover. The first one is actually one of the most interesting we’ve seen yet, featuring the robot puppet with moving gears and smoke that we first caught a fuzzy, black-and-white glimpse of in the Food Fair footage from Hamburg, Germany, although in color and with full detail visible, it looks a bit less steampunk than I had first thought.
Anyway, what’s fascinating about this is that AT&T–which was then the Bell Company–actually hired Jim in 1963 to make the following short film as part of a presentation to air at a seminar for business owners on the new subject of Data Communications, the point of the film being to comment on the continual evolution of the relationship between man and machine, and as you can see below, Jim captured the subject with a wicked sense of humor:
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Short Projects
Jim animating “Drums West”.
Today, before proceeding with Jim Henson’s next large project, the Tales of the Tinkerdee pilot, I thought I would briefly cover a number of shorter creative endeavors Jim pursued, some of which overlap with the Sam and Friends time frame. I also hadn’t touched on some of the things going on in Jim’s personal life at the time, and this post will cover some of that, as well.
So, to rewind a bit, in 1960, Jim graduated from the University of Maryland and Jane gave birth to their first child, Lisa Marie Henson. That same year, Jim attended the Puppeteers of America convention, where he met Don Sahlin, a brilliant puppet builder who would come to work/collaborate with him for many years. Around this time,
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTjsl_qnIsQ
Some time around 1960, shortly after marrying Jane, Jim Henson got a Bolex 16 mm movie camera, which had a side release button and allowed him to immerse himself in artistic pursuits other than puppetry, including the short animated film above, which he referred to as an “animated painting”.
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