Experimenting

Yesterday, and so far today as well, was all about experimenting with my puppets.  One character I'm designing needs to go through four stages over the course of the film: boy, young man, adult, and old man.  I'm making them all out of insulated copper wire, so, since the material has a uniform appearance, I'm differentiating between the puppets with subtle (and not so subtle) tricks of anatomy.  I did some research into human proportions at different ages, and I've applied the shifts to my puppets.  For example, my boy puppet has shorter legs and longer arms, proportionally, than my young man puppet, while the whole thing is scaled down so that the head (I'm using ping pong balls for all the puppets) will appear larger.  I'm also wrapping wire in different thicknesses around various points of the puppets, 1) so they all don't look like Jack Skellington and 2) so the young man can have a thicker chest, the adult can have a bigger belly, etc.

The ping pong balls have been fun.  A little known fact is that with a lot of stop motion animation, every different facial expression and mouth shape you see is actually a different head.  The animator swaps the heads out between frames to match the mouth up with the audio track recorded by the voice actor.  I did some simple tests with my ping pong ball heads, and they went pretty well.  I only made a few - just enough to practice the phrase "To be, or not to be" with different cadences and such.  Pretty fun stuff.  I also had a breakthrough in finding a way to attach my ping pong balls to my wire bodies.  My initial idea was to go with a wire, twisted into the body, that could poke through the ping pong ball and hold it like a pig on a spit.  That wasn't feasible, so I next turned to the metal pieces you use to hold tools on pegboard.  Some have rings (for holding screwdrivers) that, with a little adhesive, would be great for supporting ping pong balls.  But they were too heavy and uncooperative.  Finally, I ended up finding small nuts and some matching screws.  I wrapped a screw into a puppet's body and super glued a nut to the bottom of one of the ping pong ball heads.  The nut could then be turned until it sat sturdily on the point of the screw.  Success.