This week I have been making numerous modifications to the 'Legs' puppet (above) including lengthening the legs and more recently beginning to steadily lighten the puppet.

In this photo you can see that I have drilled holes in the puppets head to approximate hair as well as refining the shapes of various features and adding ears. I intend to reshape the top of the head and hollow out the inside as best I can to further reduce the weight as this is the heaviest part of him. I also want to rethink the neak as I'm not happy with it. As you can see I have also replaced the knee joints with leather. One of the plastic bottle joints in the knees failed so I did a rethink. I will replace the elbow joints with leather as well. He also has a control handle on his back which I have since reduced in size to better accommodate the 'Arms' puppet which interfaces somewhat humorously with it.

You can see the Arms guy taking shape in this photo from the studio. I've done a bit more work on him now. Hopefully both characters will be somewhat workable by Tuesday night for rehearsals.

This is a little mock up of the island where the Arms guy lives. It is essentially a pile of rocks which form a set of platforms on which the puppet can stand. A washing line stretches between two posts and a buoy.

I mentioned in my last post that we made some videos with the newspaper puppets, here they are:

The newspaper puppets were great to work with, really lightweight and flexible. They wore out pretty quickly though and I was glad of the string I had strung through them. We worked through a couple of little sequences and broke them down into separate little movements. We focused mainly on the Legs puppet and looked at getting up from sitting, getting from the chair to the floor and lunging.

This is a mock up I made on Saturday night, as sadly I wasn't able to retrieve the puppets from the workshop. The baby legs are a bit of a pain when you aren't controlling them directly as they just want to curl towards each other, but I like the head. In fact we are thinking we might smooth it out and use it on the actual puppet, or at least base the puppets head on this sculpt.

Yesterday (Sunday) we tested this guy out, here is the video:

He has a lot of character! I'm not sure if it was the more definite face on this puppet that helped direct the performance or the material construction and articulation, but his character really unfurled during these tests a lot more than it did during the tests with the newspaper version. We devised  a number of little sequences to explore how the puppet could be made to tackle different tasks

before constructing a mock up of his little island and filming a little section of the play that Bee had story boarded. Sadly something went wrong with the camera and the footage is too blurred to read properly.

The development and growth of the characters seems to come along with every rehearsal, in step with my growing confidence  working with the puppets. I look forward to looking through more tests over the coming weeks as we step up the amount of time we spend in rehearsal each week.

Tomorrow, or should I perhaps say later today Bee and I will be back in the workshop where I'll be able to have a proper look through the storyboards she has been working on. We aught to name the characters and the piece soon, I never know how to refer to them!

I also did a puppet workshop at BRAC on thursday, where the children and I made some simple marrionettes from recyclable junk. These were based on construction techniques from Alice Whites brilliant 'Preforming Toys' books released by Mills and Boon in the early seventies. I'll try and get some pictures of those up soon and some more info on the books.