Puppet Design

With the storyboard in place, I made a list of the puppets required to shoot. In total, I'll need 9/10 figures; the main protagonist, the mother, 5 smaller humanoids + 1 with the red circle on its chest and the two large legs. With this in mind, I began sketching out each character and researching which materials would be most effective to use.

Above: Initial sketches of puppets needed.

Below are just a few sketches of how a nuts and bolts armature would be assembled to fit my two main characters. This, of course, will take a lot of hands-on experimentation to work.

Above: Armature planning for main character and their mother.

Initially, I had always pictured these puppets made of silicone with very life-like skin; shiny and holding numerous skin pores. After seeing the third year's final pieces, I decided ask the maker of the large man on life support, what materials he used. He said that the combination of Platsil 10 silicone and Smiths Prosthetic Deadener worked really well to create an expandable and flexible silicone cast. This is definitely something I will experiment with during the puppet-making research project.

Update: After a lot of discussion with two practitioners [Tim Garrett & Gordan Tait] via email, I began to question to use of silicone and concluded that, when it comes time to experiment, I'll create multiple variations. One with silicone, one made out of some kind of fabric and maybe a few more. Below you can see the advice given.

Tim Garrett [PhD in Puppeteering]: There is more life in puppets with fabric than beautifully sculpted figures. Avoid latex & silicone! Use what you can, not expensive materials.

Gordon Tait [Created the teacher puppet for Pink Floyd's 'The Wall']: I love your black and white line drawings. Sinister Escher was my very first thought when I first saw them.The soul of your work is in them. How to pull that soul out via 3D models?Again - - - latex or silicon would not do it for me if it was my work.You may find that a harsh single light shining on the character that are made of material that fragments light falling on it will create the visuals on camera that just will not be there in the actual model. An example. Going into a club with the stage lights full on to impress the customers. Going into the same club as the cleaner with all the fluorescents switched on and all the stage lights off.