PAINTING PUPPETS

I spent the last couple of weeks working on colour schemes. Being as I work alone I never felt the need to create character sheets with all that information. I find the colour choices always look different in three dimensions anyway so my preferred method is to pull liquid rubber skins from the molds which I assemble over basic wire armatures. Then I start experimenting until I get what I want. I like the dry run it provides me before committing to the final foam rubber puppets. They’re also very useful as stand-ins for lighting tests and camera set ups. The final puppets will suffer a lot of abuse during filming so anything that helps keep them looking polished is worthwhile.

KEEPING BUSY

I’m still waiting for the weather to get just a bit warmer before I foam up the puppets so in the interim I’m building miscellaneous props. I rarely built more than one set at a time, mainly because my sets tend to be on the large side but that hasn’t stopped me from building set pieces for future use. The window is for a 3 shot sequence of my main character spying on the neighbours. The TV and stand is for a single shot cutaway of a newscast. The image in the TV is a slug which will be replaced in post by one of my animated characters. Next week I’ll have the anchors news desk ready.