I was thrilled to be Principle Puppeteer and Puppet Coordinator on this pilot for Moonmedia Entertainment. The show was created, written and directed by Harm Lust, a distinguished director from The Netherlands. It was shot in Amsterdam in November 2016.
MR and MRS Truffle, an eccentric married team, who, with the help of their oddball, unconventional and often dysfunctional extended family and staff run the magnificently chaotic, gloriously unusual ‘Truffles Hotel.’
A place where the abnormal is the norm. Truffle’s hotel is unlike any other hotel you’ve ever encountered. For one it’s is owned and run by two mushrooms. Secondly, its set in space, in an adjacent galaxy to our own called the ‘Juicy Way.’ The Hotel is a crazy intergalactic guest house, where wired out cosmic travelers can rest their weary heads.
It also acts as an inter-planetary inn and comfort stop where the weird and wonderful races of the galaxy can stop and replenish themselves with one of the many implausible and often indigestible experimental fruit-based drinks invented by Mr Truffle in the juice bar. The hotel is also home to an eclectic mix of residents who came for a week and never left. But running a hotel in space is no different than running one on earth. Its hard work, there’s competition and it’s hard to turn a coin. Especially if you’re staff are bordering on the incompetent.
Each establishment needs a unique selling point and the Truffle Hotel’s is music. The Hotel puts on a show a week and guest stars (puppets) travel into space to perform on the hotels stage on a Saturday night. To that end, the whole week revolves around attracting the next big act to bring the guests in. As Mrs Truffle is heard to say often – ‘We’re just one bad act from closure.’ And although the acts do come, (Jagger, Springsteen, Beyoncé, Lopez)– things never really go according to plan. Disaster and Catastrophe are the most regular visitors to the hotel.
