The young Star of the Film

For my first real effort at making a 'proper' Stop-motion puppet (my previous wire armature puppets were not nearly this refined) I guess the young lad is a pretty good effort. As a stop motion puppet that needs to be utilised as part of a film... He could be sooo much better. The materials used (a brushing latex outer skin with a 2 part polyurethane foam core over a machined steel armature) seem to work but there are obvious limits and issues with this type of construction. The skin needs to be relatively thick (about 1mm) to make sure that it doesn't tear when removing the puppet from the mould. This also appears to be about the exact amount that exerts enough pressure on the joints of the armature to make some poses impossible to hold. We found a way around the issue, but only because the puppet will be wearing a costume. If it was, say, a dinosaur, which wasn't wardrobed to cover up the small adjustments made to the puppet post-moulding then we would have been in all sorts of dilemmas.

That's one puppet down and one puppet to go. The next puppet is smaller than this one, the above puppet is only half a foot high, and I found sculpting at this scale a little difficult. Just a lack of practice at this scale I guess. Hope I can make the new one look and work OK.



PS. I realise now that if it ever looks like I'll get one of my children's shows up for production I'm going to have to delete this blog.