hey I’m Arran (he/him), a teenage puppet maker from hertford, England! I made this blog as a sort of portfolio for my puppetry. Current projects (tagged ‘my puppets’) include a puppet of peridot from steven universe (tagged ‘the gremlin puppet’) and a wolf inspired by snarl from firebringer (tagged ‘howl the wolf’)
i also like to talk about and over-analyse puppets i like (tagged ‘talking about puppets’) and im big into starkid right now so expect some ramblings about starship, firebringer and Wiggly
some posts are reblogs from wizisbored because that’s my main blog and either i made those posts before i made this blog, or the original wasn’t puppet-related and i’m taking it in a puppety direction over here. everything on here is of my own making / my own words
i have more past projects and future ideas to talk about so stay tuned if that’s your thing!
lil demo video if chikinbone i made for my portfolio. the walk is kinda awkward because the magnets in her ankles arent great but you can see the basic idea of how she works :)
its going to be glendale from centaurworld - i was watching a bunch of interviews with the shows creator and kept hearing how the centaurs, and glen specifically, were inspired by muppets, and i thought why not? so here's some legs. they work in the same way as the prototype i posted a video of
love entering the no thoughts only puppet zone i may have had to spend an hour at the bus stop because i was too busy making notes to pay attention to busses but now i have a fraction of a Little Guy so i am in fact winning
finally finished the frame on this guy, might weave in some thinner wire or string to make the mesh thinner and then its time to throw on some fabric :)
Black Friday is a horror-comedy musical by American theatre troupe Team Starkid, performed in theatre in October – December of 2019, with a professional recording uploaded to the company’s YouTube page in March of 2020. Though the show is not heavily reliant on puppetry, there is one large-scale but simple puppet used briefly in the show’s second act to represent the face of a dark god named wiggly, to allow the cast to show a dialogue between this entity and one of the human characters. This puppet was made by the show’s creative team, and makes clever use of the set and lighting to communicate an abstract and huge entity with simple materials and a low budget.
I first saw Black Friday via the official recording on YouTube in March 2020, a few days after its release. The puppetry element took me by surprise as it is only introduced approximately an hour and forty minutes into the show, and I was immediately impressed by how the existing set was used, with half of the puppet being hidden in plain sight from the start of the show. Before this the presence of Wiggly was shown only through dolls and disembodied lines of dialogue, so this large-scale, eerie representation is an unexpected contrast. I also liked how they simplified something as complex as a god down to a few simple elements, while the low lighting gave the impression that there could be more to the being which is simply hidden from view.
The puppet used for Wiggly needed to show a huge, otherworldly being in a way that would be intimidating and impressive, but not too complicated as the puppet is only used in one scene and enters and leaves quite quickly. This was achieved through having the tentacles be composed of tinsel that is part of the set decoration for the entire show. This tinsel is attached to a balcony so its elevation can help emphasize the god’s size in comparison to an actor stood on the main area of the stage. It being part of the set means that it does not need to be moved at the beginning or end of the scene, as actors already on stage can simply move to stand below it and hold the ends to manipulate it. The eyes are shown through two large lamps held by an actor standing on the balcony, their light allowing them to have stark contrast to their surroundings and give the impression of the god’s otherworldliness and power. This also allows for a quick entrance and exit as when they are turned off they become far less noticeable and can be easily moved offstage. Together this creates quite a basic and vague image of Wiggly, though through the image of the god being shown many times throughout the show in the form of dolls and the use of a voice actor providing dialogue it is easy for the audience to interpret this image as Wiggly.
Page two:
(paragraphs are arranged around and annotating a watercolour painting of the wiggly puppet)
EYES - The eye lamps are held by an actor standing on the balcony
VOICE - The voice lines are provided by an offstage actor speaking into a microphone, as with the rest of the show
TENTACLES - Four actors stand below the puppet and hold the ends of the tinsel to manipulate it
Low lighting almost entirely conceals the actor behind the eyes and takes focus off of the more visible ones below the tentacles, as well as obscuring the surrounding set to give the impression that there could be more to this entity and the audience is only seeing part of it looming out of the darkness.
The voice coming from speakers rather than directly from the puppet adds to the eerie atmosphere and indicates the huge presence of wiggly.
The eyes are never still, floating above the tentacles to give the impression that this is an abstract entity rather than a solid creature.
The tinsel is able to stand out in the low lighting due to it reflecting light from the eyes and through fairy lights placed along it.
The tinsel being part of the set and remaining in place both before and after becoming part of the puppet indicates the god’s omnipresence, giving the impression that he is always lurking in the background and has seen just as much of the show’s events as the audience has.
The actors manipulating the puppet take their cues from the voice actor, moving the tentacles to give the impression that the god is speaking through them and moving the eyes to suggest emotion and mirror the emphasis that the actor chooses to put on certain words and phrases.
a few days ago on my main blog i wrote up an idea i had involving Firebringer and puppets, and while i am yet to write a more polished version for this blog i have started work on a puppet for it
this is going to be a little zazzalil (ive nicknamed the puppet Chickinbone). shes designed to be 80cm tall, though i havent measured how tall the frame ended up being. Since i took these photos i have added arm rods and a handle to the back of her head. The puppet is designed to be easily detatchable, with the ankles attatching to magnets ive been taping between my toes, and a hook attatchment that fits onto my belt plus a secondaty waist strap. mechanics tests have gone well so far (although i need some practice) and I have started to build onto the frame with fabric, sticks and chicken bones. the face is paper mache on a cardboard base, and I plan on painting it to look as if it was carved out of wood. when ive finished her ill post some pictures of her finished design and probably some notes about design choices, and maybe a video of her in action.
why is it that i can never finish anything before moving on. i have an ongoing puppet project but then i was hit by the sudden desire to construct a large wolf inspired by snarl so guess whos building a big wolf boi
So I really like puppets and I really like firebringer, so it was inevitable that I’d love Snarl. While over-analysing puppets in my head I’ve noticed that most, if not all of them, have some kind of main focus to their designs. I have come to the conclusion that the focus of Snarl’s design is to communicate his massive size.
So first off, why is Snarl so big? A sabre-tooth tiger skull 16 inches long is considered large, and Snarl’s head seems to be a lot bigger than that. I think this exaggeration is deliberate. In the first scene he’s in you see him on stage beside (most of) the tribe grouped together, and they take up about the same amount of space on the stage as he does. This helps the audience to visualise Snarl as a real threat to the tribe - of course, an accurately-sized tiger would still have been a major threat but it would have lacked the visual threat of the oversized Snarl. It helps the audience to see Snarl as the tribe sees him; a creature with incredible power that seems impossible to defeat. This in turn adds to the sense of victory in the scenes where he is scared away by fire and eventually burnt. His size also helps in the scene where Grunt is dragged off by Snarl. There is no question of whether the tribe could have prevented it or if Grunt could have freed himself, and so there didn’t need to be a struggle which could have been hard to act out using the puppet.
Now, how does the design of the puppet help to communicate Snarl’s size, apart from just how big it is? The first thing that you may notice about this puppet is that it is really three puppets working together to create the effect of one very large animal. This is due to the fact that if the entirety of Snarl’s body was made, or even if the front legs and shoulders were made to connect the three parts, it would make the puppet much more difficult to handle. It may have required more puppeteers, and the head would have to be much higher up to make the body proportional. The head being higher would make the eyes and mouth harder to operate and would limit how much the actors could interact with it in scenes such as Zazzalil waving the flame in his face and Emberly attempting to use her painting to scare him away. The idea of the puppet helping the audience to see Snarl as the tribe sees him can also be applied to the design of the puppet’s paws. They are oversized in comparison to the head with their design heavily emphasising their claws, something which was established as being one of the things the tribe fears about him in the night belongs to Snarl. The lack of connection between the paws and head allows for this lack of proportionality, as trying to join them would have made the head look too small.
The overall idea is that Snarl needed to be oversized to help him be seen as a real threat. The puppet was designed with this in mind, and parts of his body are left out to allow the parts shown to be exaggerated.
i said i was going to start posting about this a while ago and it’s time to finally get around to it. I’m going to go into depth about various aspects of this later but if i started going on about every detail now this post would end up very long.
Anyway, here she is:
I call her The Gremlin. And to clarify, because one of my friends didn’t realise this when I showed her this picture, that is a full-sized chair she’s sitting on.
When she’s finished she’s going to be a single-operator puppet of Peridot from Steven Universe. I don’t have a specific use in mind for her but I’m considering bringing her to conventions as a form of cosplay. As I said, I’m going to go more in depth about her functions later, but the main points of interest are the fact that her eyes are built to create the optical illusion of her looking at you from any angle, and that her fingers will be made to move semi-independantly so that she can perform a few different hand gestures.
I’m going to start blogging my work on The Gremlin as a diary of my progress from here. Hopefully it will give me the motivation to work on her and actually get her finished - I don’t have a great track record with finishing WIPs.
