So late last year a friend of mine who is a costume designer reached out and asked if I wanted to collaborate on a project, one of the local schools was doing Frozen JR and he wanted to know if I was interested in helping create a better, more professional looking puppet for the production.
Now my background is in CAD design and CNC programming and I worked for a major animatronics company for several years I was familiar with basic puppet design.
We ended up with a single actuation point, just mouth movement as these were fairly young actors, the actuation was driven by a bicycle brake lever accessible through the back of the head and brake cables to open the jaw and springs to return it to a closed position.
The head and body were separate pieces and they were connected with elastic shock cord so it would have some “bounce” between the two sections.
Basic 1/8 MDF from amazon was used to keep costs low and the buttons, eyes, nose, and eyebrows were 3d printed and then painted, both resin and FDM printers were used.
Everything with the frame was put together using superglue and then the printed parts were bolted on so they could be removed if need be.
You can see everything was split into multiple pieces to be able to nest everything together into fewer sheets of MDF, each one had a number or letter on it to be able to easily identify which piece it belonged to as a lot of them looked similar.
After everything was put together and tested he went to the costume designer to add some “snow” to the surface, he and I got a selfie while he was there.
Wow, awesome project and first post! And Happy Cake Day! I had spent a few years making costumes for school musicals, and I’m super impressed with your work, and with the person who added the “snow.” I wish I had my GF when I was really involved. It would’ve simplified a ton of projects.
The “black eye” was from putting felt behind the eyeballs to give some separation between the white of the snow and the white of the eyes, we ended up using black felt over the sea green that was in that photo.
Your experience and skill are well displayed here. They would be a valuable asset to the community, we could learn a lot from you!
Thanks for showing up and sharing that great work.
