Post 1: Starting out

I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.

— Mary Shelley

Hello all, welcome to my new blog which will chart my attempt to create a marionette for a short film. I did a course in puppet making eight years ago and also made a stop motion puppet during an animation course, but until now I've never made a puppet in my spare time for a personal project. This'll be something of a learning experience for me so I thought I'd keep a diary of my progress.

This is Aylmerton, my stop motion puppet. I hope to make a similar character with my marionette, while learning from the mistakes I made last time round.

My first consideration when I set out to make my puppet was the issue of lipsync. I want to have proper lipsync in the finished film, and so I've had to figure out a way of giving my marionette a mouth which can be moved.

My mind quickly turned to Gerry Anderson, whose puppets had moving mouths. Here is Wikipedia's description of the process:

The heads contained solenoid motors that created the facial movements for dialogue and other functions. The voice synchronisation was achieved by using a specially designed audio filter, actuated by the signal from the pre-recorded tapes of the voice actors; this filter would convert the signal into a series of pulses which then travelled down the wire to the solenoids controlling the puppet's lips. These control mechanisms were originally placed within the puppets' heads, which meant the heads had to be disproportionately large compared to the bodies; the rest of the body could not be sized up to match, otherwise the puppet would become hard to operate. Since the production of the second season of Thunderbirds, the AP Films puppet workshop had been experimenting with a new type of puppet in which the solenoid was relocated to the chest area.

This is rather too complicated for something I'm hoping to build at home as a personal project, however. Instead, I decided to try and make a jaw with a remote-controlled hinge.

Somebody proficient with Raspberry Pi could probably knock up a suitable device quite quickly; unfortunately, I am not that somebody. My best bet was to buy an existing remote controlled device and adapt it for my purposes, and so I hopped onto eBay to find a cheap RC car.

The cheapest I could find was a £4.95 item from a seller in Hong Kong, with "REBELLION PERSON" emblazoned across the top of the windscreen. So far, so good.

More will follow...