Somewhere five felt stop motion puppets are sitting around instead of starring in Chris Boni's master's thesis.
The UBC student was going to use them as characters to illustrate evacuation birth, an ongoing issue facing rural and First Nations mothers-to-be in Northern B.C.
In December, Canada Post announced the puppets, along with a couple of other packages, had arrived at his and his family's home in East Vancouver.
When he and his wife checked the packages weren't there; they're fairly sure a "porch pirate" stole the packages (which also included an indie children's book Boni's wife had won).
"The hilarity of it is, it was the worst assemblage of packages for them to steal," says Boni.
Boni tried searching for the puppets, putting up posters and checking on Hastings to see if someone was selling them, but had no luck.
While the package won't be worth that much to whoever took them, the puppets were handmade by Toby Pikelin, a friend of Boni's and stop motion animation artist based in Toronto. While they look like felt puppets, inside are wireframes that allow them to be posed, and they have screws in the feet to allow them to free stand.
"The details: there are shoelaces, there are buttons, the detail is quite profound," Boni says.
In all Pikelin spent three weeks making the puppets for Boni, at a low rate since they're friends.
Now, she's going to do them again (even though she's also working full time on a stop motion production). Boni wants Pikelin to be properly paid for them since she's already given him a discount. To that end, he's started a GoFundMe to help make that happen.
Once he's got the new puppets, Boni will use them to create a short video to illustrate his theses, based around Northern B.C. mothers who have to travel thousands of kilometres, often at their own expense, to give birth.
"My concept is these birth pods," he says, explaining how the semi-permanent pods could help, especially when twinned with midwives.
"The pod would be a modular prefabricated housing unit that the interior of it would be all somewhat adaptable," he adds.
Due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) he has to present the idea via Zoom, which is why the idea of making a video was appealing; it's something he's done before, though not with stop motion puppets. While he's without the puppets right now, he still plans on making the video once the new batch arrives.
Currently, the GoFundMe campaign has hit just over $1,000, on its way to Boni's $1,500 goal.
