5, Rue Sésame Faces New Challenges in Creating Wheelchair-Bound Muppet
A word to the wise: It looks really silly when a 7-foot-9-inch anteater-bear Muppet tries to pick up a crayon meant for a tiny puppet that’s one-eighth its size. In fact, it gets completely lost in its furry paws.
| Nac (5, Rue Sésame) |
“We have a problem. Nac is too big for the props.”
Sesame Workshop producer Ginger Brown got the call from Georges Campagna, the executive producer of 5, Rue Sesame, the French version of Sesame Street.
Shooting was starting when the collaborators realized that the props were built for a human, and that Nac’s hands “are like big mitts,” as Brown says. They trimmed his hands and adjusted the puppet as much as possible, but it didn’t solve the problem; they needed to build a whole new set of props that were big enough for the Nac’s paws – and fast.
Nac is one of six main Muppet characters appearing in 5, Rue Sesame, a collaboration between Sesame Workshop, public broadcaster France 5, and production company Expand-Drama. The show first went on the air in 2005 and was broadcast until early 2008, focusing on basic pre-school education, the arts, and problem solving, while also encouraging diversity.
Providing children with a “window on the world”
As the show’s “mascot,” Nac is central to 5, Rue Sesame’s diversity focus, as he introduces viewers about various world cultures they may not yet have discovered.
To that end, Brown and Campagna hit on the idea of including a recurring segment called “Nac’s World” (Le Monde du Nac”), which features Nac answering children’s questions about other cultures.
“The idea behind this format is to give our audience a window on the world,” explains Tai.
Nac reads a child’s question out loud, and it is then answered through a live action film. In one segment, a child writes to him, “I’ve always wanted to dance, and I know in China there are some girls who dance with plates on their heads. How do they do that?”
Recreating France’s light and atmosphere
Brown notes that in encouraging young viewers to feel secure about exploring other cultures, it is helpful to center the action in a set that reproduces a familiar setting. The show’s creators went to great lengths to reproduce a quintessential French atmosphere, designing a set that includes a bakery and a carousel, and working carefully to simulate the look of authentic French daylight.
For all Sesame Street co-productions, it’s a priority to create a set that evokes the country’s atmosphere. A major part of this process is to recreate the look of natural daylight in a variety of places throughout the world.
“If you look at Indonesia set, there’s like this filtered light, kind of soft, there aren’t a lot of shadows. If you look at Mexico, it’s this hard flat set. If you look at the Russian production, it looks like it’s always fall -- soft, with leaves.”
To reproduce France’s natural northern light, Campagna used a single large light source -- like a sun -- which he diffused heavily. Brown says that it takes a real artist to recreate the light and ambience of a region.
"We are lucky to have worked with Georges, who is from Paris and is a cinematographer. He was able to capture the beauty of French light and still make the set bright and childlike. It draws you in. You want to be there," she says.
A successful, independent girl who happens to have a disability
| Griotte (5, Rue Sésame) |
France 5 has a strong commitment to representing people with disabilities and providing positive role models for children with disabilities. Sesame Workshop worked closely with the broadcaster and the Jim Henson Company to create Griotte, a clever, active girl in a wheelchair. The producers and writers were careful to integrate Griotte fully into the show’s action, focusing on her gifts and abilities rather than on the one characteristic that makes her different.
With her irrepressible, can-do attitude, Griotte is not only independent, she’s often more successful in her endeavors than the kids around her who don’t have a disability. She wins races. She’s popular with the other children. She gives her friends rides in her wheelchair.
Brown believes that children respond well to Griotte because a lot of young children struggle with developmental issues and they can see some part of their own experience in her.
“Maybe we all have something of that in all of us -- a detriment that we don’t want to get in the way … they see something in her, maybe a resilience that helps her help them.”
The challenge of designing a wheelchair-bound Muppet
Designing the wheelchair-bound Griotte wasn’t easy for the team at the Jim Henson Company.
For authenticity, the team decided to use a real wheelchair rather than creating a prop. So the first challenge was to find a wheelchair that was both small enough for a puppet and also well-suited to Griotte’s dynamic, independent personality.
“Eventually we used a small child’s wheelchair that had a racing style, so it looked modern and had a lot of color. We did not want Griotte in a boxy old wheelchair,” says Jason Weber, Jim Henson Company creative supervisor.
With the wheelchair in hand, the team turned their attention to constructing the rig that would support it. In Sesame Street’s early days, Frank Oz invented a chair that allowed a puppeteer to recline, sit up straight, lie at a 45-degree angle, and move along the floor. Known as the “Oz-Around,” this seemed to be a good base for Griotte’s wheelchair, so Weber and his colleagues adapted it, adding struts, as well as wheels that would spin when the wheelchair turned around.
“There were a series of wheels which pressed up against the wheelchair wheels and moved when the Oz-Around moved,” Weber explains.
The process was further complicated because Griotte is a rod puppet, which means that her hands aren’t real hands, but are controlled by rods and can’t grasp anything in the same way that a puppet like Cookie Monster or Oscar the Grouch can.
When the team saw the footage of the wheelchair in action, they were ecstatic that their efforts had paid off.
“It was magical,” Weber says. “A lot of work went into it, but the thing we came up with was a magical thing.”
The problem of Nac’s props was also resolved. Brown recalls that she and Campagna had an amusing conversation about whether Nac was too big for the props or whether the props were too small for Nac – which they soon realized was beside the point, since they couldn’t rebuild Nac. The team quickly created a second set of crayons and pens for Nac to hold in his big furry mitts.
