I was set a brief by Creative Writing student, Jonathan Melton, to design and make a large monster puppet of my own design. His only requirements were that it was fully posable (for stop motion animation).
I researched popular existing monsters such as ‘Sulley’ from Disney Pixar’s ‘Monsters, Inc.’ and ‘Oblina’ from Nickelodeon’s ‘Aahh!!! Real Monsters’, and from this concluded that cute monsters were often covered in fur. In my primary sketches, to make it ferocious, I gave it large fangs and many eyes to resemble a spider.
The construction of the monster took far longer than first anticipated, it was difficult to make it posable but still light. I had little experience in making puppets and because of this I had to remake a lot of its body parts.
I quickly had to abandon the idea of making the whole thing out of plasticine, and instead began to make its basic structure out of cardboard. Through trial and error I finished making the monster’s skeleton and began filling it with tissue paper and covering it fur. I chose black and white fur because it was stood out and made the monster more recognisable.
The final stages involved sewing all of the body parts together. Initially, I wanted to make the monster have a happy face on one side of its body and an angry face on the other side. The idea was that the monster would literally ‘flip’ whenever it switched from happy to sad or vise-versa. I encountered many problems getting this to work and eventually abandoned the idea. Instead I made the monster’s eyes removable so it could either be fitted with angry eyes, or happy eyes depending on the scene.
The final outcome was a lot better than I expected. Through regular meetings, I made sure Jona was satisfied with it too.
