Lance Jarvis: Making the Wooden Puppets

I ought to first explain how I decided what wood to use to carve with. Basically I knew I had to use a soft wood, because of my inexperience with carving and knew it would make it a little easier. So I then went on to put several different wooden textures on some puppet designs, to decide which one to pick. I decided to pick Pine, for the orangey colour to help make it stand out agaisnt the dark colours of the wooden set. Heres the pictures that helped me make my decision.

The Boy Puppet

Ill go through making the Boy puppet first, and the alterations that had to be made. Here is the initial deisgns that I was planning on using till I started using the wood, and realising the drastic changes id have to make whilst creating them.

Heres photos of carving all the items to the right size and ready for use!

I ought to say how I carved it all out, I used a saw, chisel, sander, and then when it came to the arms I bought dowel that was the right thickness and just cut and shaped it to the right side, and drilled right through the center, it saved alot of time and created some good looking arms and leggs in my opinion.

The first problem I encountered was with the heads, in my initial designs Id planned to hollow out the head and put a magnets inside. But I realised it would be too difficult and id probably end up cracking everything id made so far... So i came up with an alternative for getting the magnets inside the head, I took the drill and drilled deep enough where the eyes were, placed the magnet inside, then glued a dowel ontop of it this allowed the magnets to pull the magnetic paper to the heads, and didnt put the whole heads being broken with me attempting to hollow out the head, so in the end it proved to be the better course of action.=)

To connect all the parts of the puppet together I drilled holes throughout, so I could use the normal technique of twisting aluminium wire and copper together, to then thread through and join all the pieces together... What I wasnt expecting that the wood would have such a staggering effect on the wire. I should really of taken the wieght of the wood into concideration, as what it did was cause the whole puppet to be top heavy and be able to stand up by themselves... A major flaw in the design that I had to rectify fast if I wanted to solve this problem! So what I ended up doing with both, is drilling a hole in both the puppets backs that i then glued a dowel into, this then was able to support the wieght of the puppet, and meant id have to amke sure youd never see the bottom half of the bodies in the film. It would make animating more difficult, but theres a balcony in pratically every shot so it shouldnt be noticable. Below you can see The way i fitted the magnets and the way the dowel supports there entire weight, as they just hanged there. I then cut the dowel to the right height so the puppets look like there standing by themselves.

The next step was varnishing... To varnish all I did was buy a clear varnish, just so that it would bring out the wood grain on the puppets and help protect them abit from denting, aswell as giving them a nice finish. The final piece to make for the Boy puppet was the eyes and the finger tips. The finger tips were the most fiddlest part of the whole puppet to make them I bought the smalles dowel I could find I then shaped them and slightly drilled into them so I could glue them to the ends of the wire. At the end of the wire for the arms I untwisted them into singular strands to glue the fingertips onto. Worked quite well in the end. Though making the fingertips caused several of them cracking and braking and having to start again. It was one of the most time consuming sections of the Puppets! But worth it in the end i think =) The eyes were simple to make, I cut them to the write size and drew on a dot in black ink for the pupil, I made several sets so the pupil would be able to move, very simple, but worked well.

So thats the boy puppet pratically finished, all that was left was eyebrows and eyelids which I cut from scraps of wood from when I was chiselling and then glued the magnetic paper on the back and varnished.

Hears a photo of the finished boy puppet! I will do some proper finished photos soon.

Old Man Puppet

When making the Old Man, I underwent the exact same procedure as that of the boy, I firstly carved the basic shapes out of Pine, sanding as I went to create a smooth finish. I had the same problem where I couldnt risk hollowing them out, so I ended up using the same solution for the old man. The puppet was even more top heavy then the boy because his head is so far forward, so he had a dowel glued into his back for support aswell, then came the varnishing and eyelids, eyebrows and finger tips.
I shall upload images of the procedures but its the same as the Boy puppet, just different shapes =)

Heres general cutting, carving, sanding! In fact the top right photo you can see the magnets behind the eyes before i glue the dowel on top!