Making the Profile Police Chief Lip-Synch Shadow Puppet

The Police-chief design is meant to look futuristic but also firmly routed in present day military and police uniforms and body armour. I also wanted the design to obviously be a version of the British Police uniform because the story is set in a future version of the U.K. That said I also took some inspiration from the uniforms of other countries and a bit of sci-fi. You can draw your own conclusions on what those inspirations were but the very outsized hat was a deliberate choice.

The character has what you might call “small man” syndrome and feels he has to compensate with big status symbols (Hat and body armour). The other regular police officers/underlings will not have hats like this.

The uniform and hat also have the emblem of the City on them (a stylised phoenix) which you will see in lots of places in the course of the story.

I chose the same nodding mechanism design as I had used for “our hero” (the head pivoting on the neck rather than the neck pivoting on the body as I chose for the Prime Minister) as with the high collar on the uniform, this character would not have a lot of free movement of his neck.

This character has very close cropped hair or stubble and I was not quite sure how to achieve this at first but I am happy with the finished effect. The fact that the hat covers most of his head meant I did not have to do too much stubble cutting out!

We have now got a producer on board and we are looking for funding for the project. We are firstly aiming to secure some R&D money to produce the first 10 minute episode. This means, sadly that I will have to pause the making side of things for a while (as anything we do before securing the funding we will not get paid for). I will however be able to blog about other things and keep you up to date and progress (if any) with “The Secret Keeper” show.

In the meantime, if you would like to make a donation towards the project please use the donations box below:

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Thanks so much for contributing to our work! πŸ˜ƒπŸ‘

Thanks so much for contributing to our work! πŸ˜ƒπŸ‘

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Making the face-on puppet of our “Secret Keeper” Hero!

As I wanted the character to have white hair I had made the decision to make most of the hair as a cut-away so that it would appear as light as possible when I made the previous “in profile” puppet. For this one, however, there was rather more hair to cut as the head is bigger! It was a bit challenging to cut out such curly hair but it felt like less of a slog than the pin-stripe pattern on the Prime Minister puppets!

I found it relatively easy to transfer the profile image of this character into a front facing drawing but realised after drawing it that the glasses the character wears could be problematic when the eyelid/eyebrow pieces are in position as they will obscure the top part of the frames. I worked out, however, that the frames would appear in silhouette as the clear eyebrows pass over the top of them if I made the glasses frames as a solid shape and the eyebrows as a cut away shape. We tried out the eyebrows in different positions to see if this worked and both Tim and I were satisfied that this was effective.

What I am not sure about is whether the shape of the eyebrow/eyelid pieces and the lower lip needs to be changed as the character is looking permanently grumpy regardless of the eyebrow/lid position. I had spent so much time trying to get the puppet right by this stage though that I decided to leave the puppet looking grumpy for now and sort this issue out later if necessary.

I’ve just realised I didn’t include any pictures with the eyeballs in position, as I forgot to take any! So that’s something to look forward to for another time 😊.

If you would like to make any comments or have any questions, please do so at the bottom of the post!

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Thanks so much for contributing to our work! πŸ˜ƒπŸ‘

Thanks so much for contributing to our work! πŸ˜ƒπŸ‘

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