sketches and design of the stop motion puppet

This is a sketch for my puppet. I actually want the design to look sort of like a puppet. Yet I probably won't make the joints as balls like of a mannequin, since that would be rather suitable for wood and not sponge.

20 April 2010: We started building the wire skeleton. The most important thing to consider is where to solder the different wires. For the backbone, head and legs we use thicker wires (50-60 Ampere). The arms are made of thinner wires and especially for the hand and fingers we used very thin wires of only 10-20 A. It is very important not to solder anywhere where puppet has joints otherwise it won't be able to bend them (so for example the soldering points for the arms were a bit under the shoulder and just above the wrist. The fingers also were soldered between two fingers)....

The different body parts will be cut out of died sponge and then slit so we can wind it around the wires. The blue line of this illustration shows where the slits should be as they should be in not too noticable places since there might be small scars when the sponge is being glued together again.

13 April 2010: One of the modules is about puppet animation. These are some lecture notes on how to build a puppet. In the inside of the puppet is a kind of wire skeleton. The outside will be build by sponge. Well also watched a film by Jiri Trnka which showed how he made the puppets stand up, stay in place and keep balance. Trnka used pins in for the puppets feet so he could affix them on a cork surface.