Two woolly monsters emigrate to Hawaii...

Here are some photos of the two woolly monster puppets I made to send to John Hankins (castlegardener) as part of the international animation co-op. They are provisionally called 'Dad' and 'Toddler'. I'm afraid the lighting and focus in the photos is not great - I took them in a hurry under yellowish a light with no flash.

The Dad is a little smaller than my usual puppets, and is about 10 inches tall, the Toddler is tiny, just over 4 inches tall, and had to be made using miniature crochet with a 1mm hook.

Both puppets have aluminium armature wire and epoxy putty armatures which I wrapped with polyfibre wadding stuck in place with Copydex latex glue (one of the most versatile mediums in the world). The skins are made of hand crocheted yarn, acrylic and wool/acrylic blend in the case of the Dad puppet, and very fine angora/lambswool blend for the Toddler. The armature for the father had to be completed in stages after certain parts of the woolly skin had been sewn into place, otherwise the hands would have been too big to pass through the 'sleeves' of the skin.

The mouths are felt replacements, and other details are made using buttons and fluffy pom-poms. As usual I used french knitting (done on a circular four-pin bobbin) for Dad's fingers, which are threaded over latex and wool wrapped wire fingers.

Castlegardener's Poetree and other updates

Back again after another week of not being able to do much due to back pain...grrrrr. It means that the short I'm working on wasn't finished for the Bristol short film festival deadline and probably won't be finished for the Bacup film festival. Oh well, shit happens.
The short I'm working on is going to be the first of five episodes of a series, so I might pitch it as a pilot to 4mations and see if I can get some money to make the other four episodes. It's worth a try anyway!

Anyway, onto the most important news: A couple of weeks ago Castlegardener (aka John Hankins) finished working on a fantastic animation called 'Poe-Tree'. If you haven't already seen it, go and watch it now on his youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIqoCLQZQIk
It's John's first lip-sync animation and I love it! The woolly ent puppet is one of my creations and I sent it to John in Hawaii along with lots of replacement mouths, so I think he felt obliged to do some lip-sync with it. The voice for the ent is Oregon based animator Don Carlson (Pram Maven).
What more could you want in an animation - a very dramatic poetry-reading tree, Edgar Allan Poe, a brilliant raven puppet and John's incredibly expressive animation!

My woolly creations have also been popping up in other far-flung places recently... check out the bouncing finger puppets on Canadian animator Emmyymme's (Emily Baxter's) blog: http://emmyymme.blogspot.com/2008/08/manfrotto.html
and Shelley Noble, who is working on her film 'Halfland' in California, has received the 'woolly glove fish' (or Doug to his friends) and the shoal of 'alphabafish' I made for her. There are a couple of test shots of them at the end of this post on her blog:
http://notesfromhalfland.blogspot.com/2008/08/aint-no-mountain-high-enough-and.html

The monsters are taking over!

Next post: how to make a high-tech industrial alien looking set out of MDF, cardbord, junk, electronic components and stuff from the hardware store....