Hello! I was reminded of the wonderful puppet you made of Gwen from Spiritfarer, and I was curious; did you ever record you or someone else puppeteering her? I was curious how she'd look in motion! Thanks for your time!
Hiya! I did, unfortunately I had about three days left before presenting her to get her finished so the full puppet you see was constructed in that short window of time (the planning and experimenting with the skeleton took quite a lot longer) so sadly the footage isn't the best.
So the first clip is her head movements, she has a standard mouth plate in her face that lets you manipulate how her muzzle moves (like Kermit ^u^!). Her head isn't attached to allow for a better range of movement and also transportation lol. Her eyes light up too (still do I switched them on recently they still look super cool!) and are operated by a little switch inside the head.
The next couple of clips are of her moving about, featuring my dnd token of Angel to block out my mom who was demonstrating arm and leg movements for me (again time crunch, I would have liked to film her in the Uni studio but I ran out of time :'') ).
When designing her body I was looking at the Timon puppet from Lion King so I tried to replicate the same sort of harness as you can see in my sketchbook scribbles. In the footage of Chloe demonstrating the puppet skeleton you can see she ended up being a little bit too heavy even for the chest harness in the end and when I added fur she got quite a bit heavier ^-^'. I really wish I had more time to experiment with how to make her because I think if I were to do it again I would probably make her entirely out of upholstery or very thin EVA and maybe go for a more stylistic approach maybe making her look more like once of those wooden animal head sculptures?
^ like this. For aesthetic reasons and to save on the weight the puppeteer has to take on. I still might go back to it at some point because I'm stubborn and annoyed I couldn't get her fully operational.
You can see it a bit better in the last two clips but she also has a system of elastic strings running through her arms so that when one arm is pulled the other moves with it like in Big Bird's costume.