Category Archives: Suitcase Theatre

Making “Our Hero” In Profile Puppet

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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  • The features from the head are gradually cut out…
  • The head complete, but with lower jaw still to do.
  • head with lower jaw separate
  • head with lower jaw in position
  • Head and jaw in position on the drawing of the body
  • The image for the body has been photocopied and stuck onto card and the details start to be cut out. The neck and pivot point for the head are roughly shaped at this stage.
  • Cut out body with head and jaw in position
  • I have established the pivot point for the head and cut away all the un-necessary card.
  • The finished puppet (though without controls added yet.
  • on the OHP flatbed
  • The shadow on the screen

I was completely happy with my original drawing of the head for “Our Hero” (otherwise known as the mystery solving librarian or “Secret Keeper” from the title of the series). This is his “at home” lounging round the house look. I managed to blow up the image on my copier so that it was exactly the right size relative to the “in profile” Prime Minister puppet.

Having completed the head I re-drew the torso as the original drawing was a bit sketchy and lacking in detail. I also wanted to show him in a profile rather than 3/4 view. I’m not sure if the finished image isn’t slightly on the skew, but I knew I was happy with it, (whether it was a true profile view or not).

I decided that “Our Hero”‘s character called for a more upright stance than the Prime Minister so decided to create a head nodding action in a different way. The Prime Minister has a head and neck joined together and the whole neck pivots forward and backward on the body. This time I made the decision to have a rigid neck with the head pivoting forward and backward on the neck (I hope that makes sense – if not look at the pictures). It made it a little more challenging to join the joints on the jaw and neck as the pivot points for both were quite close together. I am creating the joints using thick thread (the same kind as I use for the joints on the miniature shadow puppets in my Shadow Puppet Suitcase shows) which is knotted on both sides of the joint.

I secured the jaw shut with elastic in the same way as with the Prime Minister (which still allows the mouth to be opened when he needs to talk). The joint is not very flat because the elastic knot is quite big but the shadow on the screen looks fine.

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Thanks so much for contributing to our work! 😃👍

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Happy New Year…..Happy New “Hero Face” Puppets

Posted on by Collette Knowles
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I have not been posting on the blog regularly for a while because I only have a limited amount of time each week to work on our Rough Magic Theatre projects.

We decided the time would be best spent actually making the puppets, as they are very time consuming. Trying to make the puppets and promote the project on social media at the same time was proving a bit much.

However, it is now a New Year and a bit of a progress report seems like a good idea and hopefully might cheer a few people up in these difficult times.

It feels very hard to motivate myself to keep going with this project (working in a vacuum as we are) but I do feel as if I have made good (if fairly slow) progress.

I have completed front and and profile view “hero face” puppets for Hugo Knox our main character (the crime solving librarian), his daughter/bodyguard Artura, the Prime Minister of the City and I have nearly finished a profile puppet for the Police Chief. So, we have a front face view to complete for him plus puppets for the President and the King of Junk Town.

After those are complete there will be a whole load of single-use puppets and sets to do to complete the first episode.

This video shows a practical experiment at how the front facing “hero faces” will work. We used the “Jabberwocky” poem from our shadow puppet suitcase show for this lip-synch experiment as it is something Tim and I already know off by heart. Tim is controlling the mouth movement and I am doing the eyes/eyebrows. This is not the voice or the words we will actually be using for the Artura character in the finished show. We saw from this that the design for this “hero face” does actually work and so forged ahead with making more for the other main characters that will need re-usable hero face puppets like this.

I also designed profile puppets with nodding head and working jaw for the Prime Minister and Hugo which I am happy with but have not come up with controls for them yet. We will have to experiment to see what sort of controls will be least visible for them.

The Prime Minister of the City (Profile view puppet)

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Thanks so much for contributing to our work! 😃👍

Thanks so much for contributing to our work! 😃👍

Thanks so much for contributing to our work! 😃👍

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