by Edith Cody-Rice
Those of you who are veterans of Puppets Up! either as volunteers or attendees, will recall the popular logo “Nick” who represents the festival. Well, the puppet Nick is based on a real Almontonian, Nick Bellemore, who as a young man created this original logo.
Nick is the son of Rose and Joe Bellemore and grew up in Almonte. His father was a member of the Valley Players.
Now living in Calgary, Nick was interviewed by the Millstone about his creation and his artistic journey which has landed him in Calgary as co-owner of the firm Foam Works which creates large scale foam 3D props for events and festivals. He is currently finishing a big float for he Calgary Stampede. His firm also creates large Frankensteins for Calgary’s Pumpkins after Dark.
As a teenager Nick took a paper clay doll making course taught by Noreen Young at Algonquin College. Noreen enjoyed his creation and took him under her wing. From that beginning, Nick made puppets for the Noreen Young bursary dinners and some classes she taught. She asked him to design a logo for the original Puppets Up! festival and he created the puppet logo “Nick”. As Nick noted, a professional designer was later engaged to refine and polish the image.
Thus launched on his creative journey, Nick attended college to learn special effects makeup and Animatronics where he put to use a lot of skills he learned from Noreen. In fact, he says that he has used those skills his entire career.
Noreen also connected Nick with a clowning course that he took and at the beginning of the Puppets Up! Festival, Noreen brought clowns in to walk in the parade. Nick performed at the festival.
Professionally, after college he was put in touch with a travelling animal show and ended up Puppeteering across Canada with it. As he says, he had to learn to love working with boa constrictors. A little later in his career he worked for movies and TV in Ontario and for an amusement park ride manufacturer, building animatronic characters for park rides.
When he moved on from that, he chose Calgary as his home and worked for foam props companies for ten years. He went back to the film industry for a while, working for the movie Prey, the most recent predator movie, and The Last of Us, a TV series on HBO. One of the Highlights of his career was working on animatronic puppets for the new ‘Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock’ series on Apple TV.
Nick has now lived out in Calgary for over fifteen years, has a wife and two children and his mother has moved there.
Nick is flying to Ontario to attend the 2024 edition of Puppets Up! he says that he loves that Puppets Up! is back and is excited to return to Almonte which he still considers home. He feels that the festival itself speaks to what Almonte is – a vibrant and friendly community. He is grateful to be able to come to this year’s festival. Noreen was such a big influence on his life and he feels privileged to have been able to live a creative artistic life for his entire career. He has donated the large foam Puppets Up! letters for this year’s festival.
