Puppet Eye Mountings

So, with the wooden bases cut and in work, the eye mountings need to be prepared. I use coat hanger wire, mainly because it is what I have always used. Not so easy to come by in this modern age, though, so I am drawing from my stash. One thing every puppeteer learns pretty quickly is to SAVE everything that might even remotely be useful in building your puppets. I have been guilty of this for at least 40 years and some of my "stash" is that old, traveling with me from place to place and inevitably right there when I need it. ( if only I had had the forsight to hoard away some "Celastic" from back in the day, now that it is no longer available!)

Anyway, based on the concept sketch I bend and shape the wire to house the Eyes, using 1/4" plastic beads as spacers. The Up/Down eye animation requires a strong base which will be epoxy bonded to the wooden mouth base piece. The Side/Side animation has an "S" base with plastic tubing for height spacing, which will also be epoxied to the base. DON'T use Hot Glue for this...only 2 part Epoxy will be strong enough to bond the eye frames down to the wooden base so that they never shift or come loose. It is messy and smelly but totally worth the strength of the bond.

A glued rigid cross-piece between the Up/Down eyes keeps them level and able to animate. A loosely bent wire cross-piece between screw eyes on the Side/ Side eyes allows them to shift easily.

Next the whole Head Assembly comes together with Eyes that move and mouth's that talk!

Puppet Head Assembly with Patterns

 Once the eyes for the puppets have been prepared, the construction of a head assembly to house the eye and mouth animations, connected to a control device, must be accomplished. Sounds complicated and it is to a degree. This is the simplest and least labor intensive method I have been able to come up with.
Several parts must be cut from lightweight pine, glued and fastened together with through-holes drilled to allow the controlling cables to run smoothly. I mill my own wooden pieces to thickness using an ordinary table saw and then cut out the individual parts with the use of a fine electric scroll saw. (TIP: Don't skimp on good quality blades for the scroll saw and change the blade OFTEN. The tighter and sharper the blade, the truer the cuts, especially circles and rounded back cuts. Spend a bit more money and a bit more time and save yourself a lot of heartache!)

 Here is where a good set of preliminary sketches really pay off. Done correctly they act as blueprints to guide you through the process of creating patterns. I use a medium weight card and draw out each pattern, cutting this out with Xacto knife and scissors and checking for fit against the sketches before starting to cut any of the wooden parts.

 Here the control handle with central support dowel and lateral finger-control dowel is shown. The controller must fit naturally within the palm of the hand to give support to the head while both thumb and forefinger are free to control the animations without hinderance. I spent a good deal of time with this handle pattern to include grooves for the three fingers gripping it. The puppeteer will be able to slip their hand inside the back of the puppet and grasp the controller with ease, ready in a moment to perform.
Remember that no matter how beautiful your finished puppet may be, if the puppeteer has trouble operating it because you neglected to fit the controls to their hands it will never perform as beautifully as it should.

These preliminary patterns underwent some revision as the assembly process went forward. This is natural and should not lead to frustration for the puppet builder. This process is organic and must work for each puppet you make. What works for one won't necessarily work for the next. All four of these puppets, since they will appear together on stage, are based on the same model, and yet each character is distinct with it's own look and mannerisms. My next post will show how the eye animations are constructed and the final assembly of all these patterns into a working puppet head armature.

PUPPETS - The Eyes Have IT!

 When I first design a puppet, I begin with the eyes. The eyes must convey a wide range of emotions, either fixed or with animation. The Puppets for LILI all have some form of eye animation, so the eyes must be produced individually with that function in mind. Above is a preliminary sketch of what CARROT TOP might look like. The finished puppet may look nothing like this, but to establish scale and measurements I must first make a preliminary sketch....

 Here we see the eight "eyes' for the four needed puppets, drilled and gessoed & ready for painting. CARROT TOP and MARGUERITTE will have open / close eye animation. Much like a doll, their eyes will be able to open and close with a flick of the puppeteers finger. REYNARDO, the fox and GOLO, the giant will have side to side animation. Their eyes will be able to shift  back and forth with the same slight movement of the puppeteer. The base for the eyes are 1 & 1/4" diameter wooden drawer pulls from the hardware store. These are slightly flattened at the back with a 1/8" hole pre-drilled. I drill another 1/8" hole perpendicular to the pre-drilled one which will either allow the eyes to swing up and down or side to side on a wire base

My style for eye painting is something I have perfected over the years. It must be remembered that these puppets will be at least 30 feet from the audience, so texture is very important in conveying the overall look and "feel" of the characters. Realistic or "plastic" doll eyes would not "read" at that distance, so the painting must be done with bold strokes which look very rough close up. Here I lay out the basic eye color and shape using a round foam brush. I will later fill in the shapes by hand with finer and finer paint brushes, adding the white and black elements of my stylized eye...

Finally I cut fine grooves into the eyes of CARROT TOP  & MARGUERITTE in order to fit slim trunk-fiber eyelashes into the wooden balls ( eyelids for REYNARDO & GOLO  will be built up over the shiting eyes as the face is constucted later). A small clear rhinestone is cemented in place within the pupil of each eye. These will glisten under stage lighting to impart an extra measure of "life" to the characters eyes. The last step is a wash of polyurethane varnish over the eye to create that wet texture that all true eyes have. Here from bottom to top are CARROT TOP's eyes (green), MARGUERITTE's eyes ( blue), REYNARDO's eyes ( brown ) and GOLO's eyes ( black ).

Once the eyes are ready the woodwork involved in making the controllers for these rod puppets can be started. That will be coming up next week.....

LILI on the Hip Pocket Theatre stage

 Before I began writing the script for my adaption of "LILI" for the stage, I built this scaled model of the theatre and peopled it with 3" tall cutouts of characters from the film. By moving these around I was able to make sure that my ideas for staging the show would work in the space. As I worked, my concept for the movable set pieces took shape, as well as the overall look of the show. Everything will start with a bare stage...

 The "Magic Act" at the center of the first part of the play will be performed as Black Theatre with the props appearing, moving and disappearing with the aid of black hooded puppeteers against a black curtain. The banners and balloons will be brought out and placed onstage by the actors as they "set up" the Carnival, just as they would in real life. Small tables and folding wooden chairs will be moved in and out to represent audience seating as well as physical aspects of the two Wagons where the Magician and his assistant and the Puppeteers and Lili live.

The puppet booth will likewise be brought in and assembled in front of the audience by the actors. The puppets will be operated by the same black hooded puppeteers against the darkness behind this central platform. This will allow the puppets to make swift entrances and exits by being simply moved backward out of the light with the puppeteer's body masking them as they turn around. The actor playing the puppeteer PAUL will stand to the side behind the curtains and voice all the characters. Not having him actually work the puppets will free him to phsically play his onstage role without having to change costume and makeup quickly.

These photos only document my thoughts on the staging and do not represent my final designs for the set. I have already made changes and upgraded my ideas for the final design which I will share later.

First, Those puppets...

My Return to the Hip Pocket Theatre

 Through a strange series of events this past year, I have been reunited with the HIP POCKET THEATRE in Fort Worth, Texas, for whom I worked designing and acting in several productions from the mid 1970's until the late 1980's. This past October the Theatre hosted a "Film Fest" featuring videotaped versions of shows in which I happened to appear in 1985 and 1986. As an added introduction PEGGY BOTT KIRBY and I appeared on the current Hip Pocket stage as characters we had last played 30 years ago! Here in the photo are Ms. Bott-Kirby and myself as Meema and her nephew Arthur Clinton Bostick. The first showing of the three night festival was...

ADVENTURES WITH JUNE & SCOTTY from 1985. In which she and I first played these two characters, members of an extremely strange extended family, based on playwright JOHNNY SIMONS' own boyhood growing up around Lake Worth in north Fort Worth. We staged this play Upstairs at the White Elephant, a space above the historic saloon in the heart of old cowtown in Fort Worth. It was my first production as designer up there, a room about 50 feet square that I have blogged about before as being "painfully intimate". Johnny surprised me by bringing out this rendering of the set for the show...I had completely forgotten I had even done it!

The Film Fest was a great success, helping to showcase the archives of recorded plays, music, design artwork and printed programs and photographs, as well as physical props and costumes which still survive from 40 years of a local theatrical institution that has been THE HIP POCKET THEATRE.

Our aim is to digitize all of this vast array and make our work available to every theatre artist via the internet for study. An immense task, to say the least. I am doing my small part here, but there is So Much More!

Beginning next week...after 30 years, I am going to document here my designs and building of a production for the Hip Pocket's 39th season in 2015. The play is a staged version of the Classic and Acadamy Award winning 1953 film "LILI".

 I had wanted to do this back in the 1980's, but it never came to fruition. Now I've been given a second chance and I have re-imagined the story with a more modern sensibility. Not a by-the-numbers staging of the film, but a very unique play based on the material. My script has been approved and we open next August 14th  under the stars out at the new HPT location.

The first step for me is the design and construction of  4  Very Special Puppets,  as anyone familiar with the original work will understand. I began work on these three weeks ago, and I will be blogging about every step of their construction in the next few weeks...