Instructions Not Included?
Posted By Kathleen David on August 7, 2007
Before I get into one of my rants, a bit of other news. Yesterday I did something I hadn’t done in a while. I auditioned for a puppetry gig for a company that makes videos to help speech teachers. If I can get the voice where they like it, I have the gig. It was interesting since I did the auditions with several of the potential human lead for the series. It was a very well built puppet and fun to operate. I hadn’t operated a puppet that long in a while. Fortunately my shoulder doesn’t hurt this morning. It was fun. If I get the gig, I’ll be shooting the first part of it in September.
Now the rant, which comes out of a couple of discussions on various boards on a variety of subjects (puppet building; doll patterns; costuming mostly). It started on a doll board with a women who makes incredible dolls and also teaches doll making at various venues. I have admired her work before I knew she was part of this group. She had ordered some patterns and instruction books from some other doll artists that she admired to try to learn some more about doll making. Now this woman created patterns so if anyone is going to be able to work through directions, it is going to be her. She is rather disappointed that the information that she needed to create a doll that looked like the ones the pattern was suppose to make was no where to be found with in the instructions. Now if you buy a pattern (and theses patterns aren’t cheap) don’t you expect to be able to make the doll that is pictured?
Some puppeteers I know are very giving of information on how they did things and some will tear you a new one if you touch their puppets and try to figure out how they did something (this even if they handed you the puppet to operate for them). How I make my puppets is no secret. In fact I am doing my puppetry demo/lecture at DragonCon again this year but I am expanding on what I did last year based on some feedback and questions I got from the group. But if I buy a puppet pattern from someone, I expect to have all the information I need to create or recreate the puppet that I am buying the pattern for. Again these aren’t cheap but I am willing to pay for the R&D that went into the pattern if I can make puppets with it. I do have a slight problem with having to pay for two patterns. One for the foam and the other for the fleece considering how much I am paying for one pattern is a bit excessive (like $100 for one puppet pattern when all is said and done) and it is still missing a technique to complete the puppet that I already know because I have been doing this for as long as I have but someone just starting out is going to be in a real bind.
There was a complaint on a costuming board about a corset course she was taking. She paid the money and expected to be able to make a corset by the end but apparently this was the first of two classes she needed to purchase to complete the project. Now I went back and read the information on the class and I would have to say that unless you read between the lines, it seemed to me that you should be able to make a full corset after finishing this course. The person teaching the course did agree that what was written was not clear and blamed the parties who set up the course for writing the copy. She did give the woman the second half of the course for cost to the designer so that turned out OK. But it still annoyed me that this was not one course.
If you agree to teach something to a group, then just teach it. I consider it bait and switch if the participants aren’t given the information needed to create the example given for what the class is for. Super secret techniques are fine to have if you say up front that you aren’t teaching how you do that and it does not affect the final product. Besides you are probably not the first to figure out how to doing something that way and you won’t be the last.
I am grateful that I took Wendy’s doll-making course first since she is perfectly willing to explain how she does things and she explains things well too.
Call me thick, but if I buy a sewing pattern from, say McCalls, Butterick, Burda or Vogue, the pattern comes complete with instructions – that’s what I’m paying for. Why should these people get away with only providing half of the pattern – no instructions, the pattern’s not complete IMVHO.