As if you wondered who'd write this, I'm Christopher Bennett and I play Rabbit in Steam Powered Giraffe.
Welcome!
Here we're gonna peel back the veneer of Steam Powered Giraffe and take a look at the inner workings of San Diego's musical pantomime troupe. Nestled quietly in the Cavalcadium for fan club members' eyes is a place we'd like to share our behind-the-scenes experience, past endeavors, development, concepts, and ideas not made immediately public. Here you'll see behind the makeup; See the splattered paint, the raw ingredients that go into the production of what we do. And if you stay with us, you might catch tricklings of future plans. GOODIE.
This area probably isn't for everyone. If you have no interest in seeing the strings, you might find this boring. All the same, the option to dig deeper into our group is here for you. I'm doing this as a chronicle of our creation; be it the mime, music, or artwork. For the super-fans or anyone curious as to what actually goes into making this crazy act somehow work.
For our first entry, I'd like to share some images from when we were starting out.
Seen here is a photo manipulation of myself a few months after we began in January 2008.This is an early idea of Colonel P. A. Walter I. Since, we've reimagined his appearance and this photo is no longer used.
Our mime instructor, Jerry Hager, performed his one-man-show Mankind at the Sunshine Brooks Theatre, in addition to a Christmas Show staring his character Kazoo. For both, SPG and another one of his students helped draw people in from outside as shifting statues and Christmas characters respectively. He managed to convince the friendly folks at the Sunshine Brooks to let SPG put on a stage show in their historic theatre.
We were giddy.
The show what formed was directed by Jerry, loosely inspired by the backstory we were cooking up for the robots, and detailed the events that took place in the infamous Plifterston, New Pennsyltucky World's Fair.
This was a teaser poster for Myspace that I made. You can see the old historical photo manipulations and one of Jerry, who played Colonel P. A. Walter III.
When our newsletter first premiered, we did full newspaper-esque header images with jokes and little comics.
But, we switched to a simpler version deciding the effort was counter productive.
Still worth a chuckle to see.
Album One's case design went through a lot of concept stages, some far more terrible than what I'm showing here. This was whipped up with a number of other concept covers.
The SPG Webcomic was in concept for quite some time, and here's a sketch from early 2009 with cartoon versions of the robots.
Notice Rabbit's old tailcoat. AND HOW FAT.
That's all for now!
