Post 6: Love the skin you're in

"Was his face made up of human skin, like in The Texas Chainsaw?"
"Ben, everybody's face is made of human skin."

"That is so true."

 — Reaper

The good news is that the clay head came out of the plaster pretty painlessly; I was expecting the clay to be torn in the process, but since it survived intact I can make a second mould if something goes wrong. The only problem is that the tub wasn't quite deep enough to accommodate the long, pointed nose that I gave the head. Oh, well, the puppet will have to get by with a stumpy schnozzle.

The first thing I noticed about the latex is just how quickly it dried. While applying it with a paintbrush it was just a few seconds before I ended up with a wad of rubber on a stick.

But anyway, I managed to get a few coats done, and this is the result. The nose needs work, and there are some bumps and ridges which need sorting out.

The latex turned out to be rather hard to cut. Knives didn't do the job, so I had to snip away with scissors. It still needs to be evened out in places, but this'll do for the time being.

I must have misjudged the size of the clay head, as its latex copy isn't big enough to contain the polystyrene egg. No matter, I can just whittle away at the egg for a while until it fits.

So, everything's going smoothly, then... except for one problem. And it's a pretty big one: the jaw motor isn't strong enough to open the latex mouth.

So, where to from here? Should I trim away at the back of the latex, to make it lighter? Will I need to rig up a new motor of some kind?

Hrmm...

Post 5: Clayface

I gathered that what he chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen.

—  M.R. James

Before I can make a latex face I'll need a mould, and before I can make a mould I'll need a prototype face made of clay. Now, this'll make me seem awfully sloppy but I haven't actually drawn any sketches or made any other kinds of notes when it comes to character design. Up to this point my main concern was getting a working jaw together; if that idea hadn't worked then I'd have had to go right back to the drawing board, so I didn't want to get too bogged down with designing the final look of the puppet. Because of this I went into designing the face blind.

This will explain why my first attempt came out looking like the golem of Prague sucking a lemon.

I pressed on and eventually ended up with something a bit more presentable.

Incidentally, the polystyrene egg which I used to make the actual puppet head came in a pack of three; I used one of the other two as a base for the clay.

And finally, I dumped the thing in a tub of plaster.

To be continued...

Post 4: Fifty reasonably skin-coloured balloons go by

I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great god, His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscle and arteries beneath...

— Victor Frankenstein

When I made my stop motion puppet, above, I used ordinary acrylic paint as skin after building up the head with papier-mâché. I won't be trying that this time round as it left a rather uneven finish and, more to the point, would show the joins on this puppet's jaw. Right from the start I decided to give latex a try.

Thing is, I've done little work with latex and hoped to take a shortcut by finding ready-made latex skin, of a sort...

Hopping on eBay I found a packet of fifty balloons in a colour (officially called "ivory cream") which serves as a reasonable skin tone. I've actually had these for a while now - they arrived before the polystyrene head, which I also bought online - and in the meantime I experimented with stretching them over various objects. The nozzles turned out to be surprisingly accommodating - I even managed to get the end of a Coke bottle in one - but would they fit the head? Well...

The short answer is a firm no: for one, the head was just too slippery to be inserted into a balloon. Instead I cut a balloon in half and tried to stretch it over the head and pin it in place.

It didn't take long for me to realise that this just wasn't working, but I carried on mainly for the comedy value. The drawing pins I was using were too short and kept popping out, so I had to use something longer - the longest things I had at hand being cocktail sticks. Balloon rubber is also hard to cut with any accuracy, resulting in some incredibly wonky eyeholes. On the other hand, once you cut a balloon in half, it begins to tear down the edges very easily, so there was no way I could cover the whole head.

Moral of the story: don't use balloons as skin.

After this object lesson I decided to do it properly and mold some latex skin of my own. In the meantime, I found a way of keeping the car in place while also finding a use for the copper wire which was too heavy for the wheels to lift - two birds with one stone!

That said, I do wonder how long it will last. Now, when I have to remove the car to recharge it (which is quite a bit) I'll have to remove the copper wire as well. How long before it starts to get a bit loose? Oh well, I suppose I can pad the holes with blu-tack.

Post 3: Getting my head together

There's nothing to fear. Look — no blood, no decay. Just a few stitches. And look, here's the final touch: the brain you stole, Fritz.

— Henry Frankenstein

When I made my stop motion puppet a few years ago I used a polystyrine egg as the base of the head; I decided to go down the same path again this time. I won't be using marbles for eyes like I did last time, however; I bought some doll eyes online instead.

After a good deal of poking and carving I separated the main part of the jaw from the rest of the head, and also made a slot for the car. The jaw needed some sort of wire; at first I used some copper wire, but it turned out to be too heavy for the car's wheels to lift. Instead I used some of the grey plastic toy packaging wire I mentioned in the first post.

This jawbone had to be connected to the car wheels (now hear the word of the Lord!) and the most obvious way to do this was with superglue. However, as I said in the last post the car will have to be removed to be periodically recharged, so I'm hestitant to permenently attach anything to it in case that caused any problems when it came to disentangling everything. Instead, I made two plugs out of milliput which slot in between the spokes of the wheels and glued them to either end of the wire.

So far, it seems to be working - the main thing I need to figure out right now is how to keep the car in place (in the video above I used masking tape, but this is only a temporary measure.)

Post 2: Motormouth

With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me...

— Victor Frankenstein

My £4.95 remote controlled car arrived, and what a bargain it was. It even came packaged with four tiny bollards!

The most encouraging thing about it is just how small it is. I was fully expecting to have to dismantle the thing and work its innards into a device of my own making, but once I've started on my puppet's head the car should be able to slot in easily.

I'm still left with the question of how to convert a toy car into a puppet's jaw. As the car would need to be periodically removed from the head to be recharged, I initially hoped to keep the car and the jaw fairly separate, so that they can be quickly disentangled when needed.

My plan was to rig up a pulley system by running a cord or thread between the two motorised wheels of the car and hooking the jaw to it. First, I tried using thin wire (the grey plastic kind sometimes used in toy packaging) but this prevented the wheels from moving. I gave cotton thread a try, and found that it was too flimsy: it could move things up but had trouble keeping them there.

Eventually, I decided to go for the simplest approach and attach the jaw directly to the wheels. The mock-up in the video above, made using cardboard and blu-tack, looks promising. My next step is to buy the materials for the head and get started on the real thing.

(As you can hear, I had the radio on when I made the above video. I considered removing the soundtrack but decided to leave this slice of broadcasting history intact...)

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...