Santa's Stressful Day

Hi everyone!

First of all, apologies for the absence of posts during the past month. I've been settling into my third year at university, and embarking on a new project which will last the duration of this term. Don't worry, The Nausicaa Project will be back in full swing after Christmas!

Santa's Stressful Day:

As part of my final year as a Performance Design student I have to take on the role of designing a college show. For me this is a perfomance called 'Santa's Stressful Day', which is a brass/percussion piece accompanied by a narrative. The story revolves around Santa having a crisis - discovering his reindeer are sick the day before Christmas Eve, and having to travel to different countries in search of other animals to pull the sleigh!

This production has been put on at my college several times with great success, but my involvement will be the introduction of rod puppets to accompany the music and narration. I'm designing and making Santa Claus and the host of animals he encounters on his quest. This includes a Rudolph, a lion and a bunch of guinea pigs. Another girl on my course is making the kangeroo and panda bear.

My puppets have to be ready for rehearsals by the end of November, so I'm already very much underway with making them. 

My process began with gathering research and thinking about how these puppets would look and work. Given that the animals talk and interact with Santa, I decided to take an anthropomorphic approach with their look and function. I felt very much inspired by Disney's Robin Hood (1973), in which the animals are quite obvious animals, but have the mannerisms and two-leggedness of people.

I sketched and painted a lot of ideas for how the animals might look. Here's an early design for the lion:

I like the idea of them having some element of clothing.

The guinea pigs Santa encounters in Peru are dressed in traditional attire in my drawings here. As Santa goes to different countries to look for animals to pull his sleigh, I thought it might be fun to include a stereotypical or traditional element of that country in their appearance.

The aesthetic of the puppet is only half the story - knowing it wil function in the desired way is very important. Taking my 'final designs' in terms of appareance, I drew out scale drawings of the puppets, in order to work out the internal mechanisms.

Due to my small time frame I didn't have time to maquette much, and therefore lots of things have been worked out and changed along the way. This is often the nature of making anyhow!

My original plan was to make jointed legs out of plywood, so I worked out how these would function with cardboard mock-ups.

After carefully drafting out all of the pieces for the arms and legs, I worked out there would be over 100 pieces to cut out on the bandsaw and sand. This would mean needing a lot of plywood and time, neither of which I had! It was a beneficial exercise as I now know how to construct functional wooden puppet limbs, but I worked out a method which would be quick, easy and work just as well.

These limbs are made of PVC pipe and leather. The leather acts as the 'joints' of the puppet, flexible enough to pose but also strong. There are bigger half pieces of pipe on some of the joints that act as stoppers, so the puppet can't pose in an unatural way. For example on elbow joint of the arm there are two pieces of half pipe that meet in the middle, so the arm can bend towards the body but not swing backwards. I don't want my puppets to look like they have dislocated limbs!

This photo shows the basic internal structure of Santa, Rudolph and the Lion. The two plywood spheres mark the shoulders and the pelvis. They will act as formers for building up the body shape. There is rope inbetween the formers to seperate them the correct distance and give the space inbetween some flexibility. The black, corrugated pipe should also create a natural bend in the body. 

The sturdy pipe which grows from this is the rod which operates the head - it can manually be turned by hand so the puppet can look from side to side. The trigger on the white pipe is attached to a lever which connects to the lower jaw, and this makes the mouth open and shut when pressed down. These motions will be controlled through the back of the puppet. The other hand of the puppeteer will control one of the arms on a rod.

Building up the body shape is the next stage. I'm builking out my puppet bodies in upholstery sheet foam, which can be layered up and cut into shape with scissors.

As you can see, the shaping of blue foam can transform plastic tubes and plywood ovals into a very three dimensional puppet! It's incredibly lightweight stuff, which is an added bonus.

The heads of the puppets will also be carved from upholsterty foam. This process is more laborious, as it involves cutting the shape from a rectangle block which is the front and side dimensions of the head.

Once again the foam is very light, so the head adds hardly any weight to the puppet.

I've been making these puppets for the past three weeks, and much of the process has been trial and error! I'm happy with how they're looking so far, and am on schedule to have the bodies ready for fabrication in a couple of weeks time.

Now that I've got my bearings on this project I'm going to endeavour to keep my blog updated on a weekly basis.

Thanks again for reading about my work! 

Nausicaa Mark II: Planning is Important!

After sharing my work so far with fellow puppet makers (who also happen to be big fans of Nausicaa), it was brought to my attention that the armature I had made wasn't quite suitable for her character. I had been focusing so strongly on how to encorporate soft sculpture with an armature that I hadn't thought enough about her specific proportions, which are very different from the standard human skeleton.

Nausicaa has an oversized head, very large feet, a teeny tiny waist, extra-long lower legs - the list goes on. Despite my hard work on my first armature it seemed fruitless to use it for my Nausicaa puppet, and so I started re-planning. It began with going through the film and taking a lot of screen shots, my best reference material:

This is ther perfect front-on reference for her face and torso shape. See what I mean about the waist?

Then I began re-drafting my scale drawings, but this time starting with the 'finished' Nausicaa look and working backwards. That way I knew that the body beneath the clothes would have to be a bit slimmer, and the armature would have to work with the body shape.

So firstly the costumed layer is drawn. The tracing paper didn't like being photographed, but hopefully you can see Nausicaa is wearing a tunic with gloves, leggings and big boot covers.

From this I worked out the fleshed out nude version.

By doing this, I knew that the armature I designed underneath would fit the desired body proportions. As you can see, it's quite a bit different from my original design.

I did the same for all three layers for the side view. All the while I'm trying to keep my scale drawings as accurate as possible to Nausicaa in the film.

So it was time to build! I began by cutting and preparing all of the pieces I needed to make the armature and laying them out on my front-on armature drawing.

The new ribcage and pelvis are carved from blocks of plastazote foam, which is a very high density but also extremely lightweight foam. It was simple enough to carved with just a scalpel and mini files. I'm trying zote as an alternative to wire for soft sculpture, because its more accurate and less fiddly to shape. I also think the solidness of it will be more suitable for animating.

It was time to start glueing the pieces together. As you can see, the zote foam cores are sliced down the middle and hollowed out where necessary to accomodate the K&S brass tubing inside.

Putting the legs together is always satisfying.

I made the feet in the same way as my last armature, the copper toes secured with milliput and embedded with M3 nuts for tie-downs. I'm using a scale foot drawing to make sure that the toes are in the right position on the foot.

The final detail which I didn't get onto with my last armature are the hands. I'm using double ball joints for the wrists, because I want that twist so the hands can be positioned palm-side up or down. I'm using a double-twist of copper wire for the fingers, which is a bit stronger than aluminium but still holds its shape well.

The hand is made strong and secure with milliput. There are tiny M2 nuts placed in the centre of the wrists for potentially holding props.

I'm much happier with my second armature attempt. I think it will work very nicely for Nausicaa's proportions.

One last step was adding rig points to the pelvis. There's one in the front, one in the side and one facing downwards at the back so she can be slotted onto Kai's back.

Taking the time to plan very carefully is a valuable lesson learnt! Now I can get on with sculpting Nausicaa's head, Kai's feet and his beak.

Thanks for taking the time to check out my work again,  and look out for my next post soon!

Building Armatures: Kai the Horseclaw

Firstly, apologies for the lateness of an update! I've been suffering from an eye infection but am on the mend now, so let's carry on from where we left off: Kai's armature. Here's a reminder of this prehistoric looking bird's appearance:

I had already made a maquette from steel of the horseclaw which I was happy with the scale and proportions of, so rather than drawing out multiple angle scale drawings for the armature like I did with Nausicaa, I just made one of the side profile. This is my initial model; although crude, it has the desired shape of the bird:

It was important to look carefully at references of the film to check Nausicaa's proportions against Kai's. The Nausicaa puppet will be 15" tall, which makes Kai 18" tall.

I started off by cutting, filing down and sanding the pieces of brass K&S that would make up the legs and the pelvis.

In the same way that Nausicaa's armature was built, twisted aluminium wire protected by heat shrink tubing makes up the joints of the leg. There's a twisted loop at the bottom of the leg to create a base for the foot.

The toes were then created with four seperate pieces of wire, and glued into the loop for extra strength. The three front toes are the same length, the back one is shorter. You can see from this screenshot that when the horseclaws put down their feet the side toes are splayed right out, rather than being angled towards the centre front toe.

Here are the finished legs. The toes are made extra-secure to the leg with milliput, and M3 nuts are placed in the middle of the feet so they can be tied down. There are also little milliput blobs on the end of the aluminium to stop the armature from potentially damaging the skin of the foot later on. The pieces of K&S at the top of the legs that angle inwards will slot into the pelvis.

The ribcage is formed with a double strand of aluminium wire attatched with brass to the back of the bird. This will be suitable for the soft sculpture build up I want to experiment with.

The same is done for the pelvis shape. Once again, any joints that might not be strong enough with just glue are made extra-tough with milliput. At this stage the armature is nearly ready for the 'wrapping' process. The only thing that I forgot to photograph were the rig points added. There are rig points in both sides of the bird's ribcage should he need to be supported when animating. There's also one in the base of his back for Nausicaa to be slotted into when she's riding him.

The entire armature is wrapped in yarn so it has a sewable base for the wadding muscle to be built up onto.

I based this armature on a combination of different bird skeltons, looking at the leg shape of chickens and the ribcages and pelvis' of terror birds for reference. Ultimately it's been made to fit my scale drawings, and should be proportionate to Nausicaa's armature which I made alongside it.

Before I start giving this armature flesh I need to make the skull and the beak. The same goes for Nausicaa's head. Having the heads of my puppets on the armatures will help to keep the muscle build up even and in proportion.

Thank you for reading, do check back for another post very soon!

Building Armatures: Nausicaa

I began planning this project in April, and when the summer holdiays finally came around I was ready to start making. 

The first step was to draw scale images of my puppets from different angles, and use these drawings to design the armatures. Let's start with Nausicaa.

I knew that I wanted her to be 15" in height, the size of an antique Japanese doll I own. I scaled up a front, back and side profile of a skeleton diagram to use as a base, and traced over it to plan the armature. 

The skeleton I'm making for my Nausicaa puppet is a more advanced version of the previous skeletons I've made for soft sculpture experiments. Although the pelvis and skeleton will be steel, the arm and leg joints are twisted aluminium, which holds its pose best for animation.

The brass K&S metal forms the 'bones' of the puppet, the gaps inbetween where the aluminium wire joints are. These were cut to size and filed down to remove any sharp edges.

The aluminium wire has heat shrink tubing applied to it, which will prevent the aluminium rubbing against the brass when bent - any nicks in the wire will weaken it and might cause it to break. The wire is then glued into the brass tubing with a strong 2 part epoxy.

The square K&S creating the basic pelvis structure will also serve as a rig point. If the puppet needs to be supported whilst being animated, a smaller piece of K&S attached to a rig can be slotted in through the back.

I made the feet in a similar way to Lisa Lichtenfels, with the wire twisted to make that nice back heel shape. This will work as a nice structure for soft sculpture.

The toe shapes are then added on, formed from a very fine copper wire.

By adding nuts to the balls of the feet, they can be tied down to a set. The nuts were first glued to the foot and then encased in milliput. Milliput is an incredibly strong 2 part putty, and once cured goes solid as a rock. This will stop the nuts from potentially coming loose.

Now that I had the basic shape of Nausica's body, is was time to build up the 3D skeleton element for soft sculpture - the ribcage and the pelvis.

The ribcage has always been tricky; getting symmetry and that bell shape with steel wire is quite difficult. I decided to try something a bit different, using very small brass tubing on the spine to slot the wire of the ribcage into.

This seemed to work very well, as it helped with the placement and shaping of the wire. Here is is half built up. The ball joint at the top of the puppet is so that the head and neck can be posed in a natural way. 

I cut the threaded rod to size, which is where the length of the neck. In this image they're just temporarily threaded on - the thread needs to be soldered to the ball for permanence.

The finished ribcage - I'm happy with how it came out!

And here's the final armature, minus the hands (I'm waiting on some wrist joints, so will talk about those in a different post!).  I'm quite happy with how she's turned out, and have certainly learnt a lot along the way. The next stage will be wrapping the armature in yarn for soft sculpture, but before I can do this I need to sculpt as cast the skull for the head.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for my next post, which will be about making the armature for Kai the bird.