I was interested to see if I could come up with a simple design which would be fairly easy to construct and yet still seem to be "skeletal". I hit upon the idea of using wooded beads of various sizes for the "joints" and simple wooden cut-out shapes for the arm, leg and rib "bones". Even the fingers and toes are made of wooden beads glued to a wired armature. The head is once again a 5" styrofoam ball carved to shape, but this time I used a newspaper and brown craft paper layered paper-mache covering of about 3 layers each since the head needed to be completely smooth all over.
How does it work, you ask?
The Controller for the Skeleton is an inverted cross. Strings attached to the Upper joints of the Arms and Legs run through the beads at the Shoulders and Hips and are tied tight while the top of the cross is straight up so that the Arms and Legs appear to be attached to the Body. The Head is also run through these same strings through the ear to ear looped wires, but is not attached to the Body at the neck.
Now a second set of strings is run to a removable bar which clamps to the crossbar. These strings run down to the Hands and Knees. The Head has one string attached to the top which runs to the bottom of the cross through a screw eye and fastened to a ring there.
To make the Skeleton walk you just keep the cross pointing straight up while moving the detachable bar forward. To make the Skeleton come apart you slowly tip the cross backward while moving the detachable bar in the opposite direction...the support strings slacken and the joints separate. The Head will naturally move with the rest of the Body as the cross is tipped, and can be raised and lowered independantly with the use of the ring attached to the top string.
It takes some practice to make the effect work effectively, as seen in the production photo of BOB ABDOU ( MR. PUPPET ) seen below. He combined the disjointing effect with a piano routine for a very fast-paced and entertaining act.
No comments:
Post a Comment