Fabricated Films: "I Am a Flamingo" Production Photos - Puppets Pt.1

Hey Steemers!

So a project that I've been working on intermittently for the last few years is almost finished, so in the coming days before it's released, I wanted to start sharing some production photos.

The story is told thru the actions of these two characters, Allie the Alligator and Mingo the...you guessed it -- a pigeon.

In this post I'll be talking a little bit about Mingo, and the process I used to bring her to life.

Step 01: The Design

The design of Mingo actually came to me very easily. Usually when I'm designing a character based on real life, I'll study the animal and really try to figure out its distinctive characteristics. In this case, a flamingo's coloring, boomerang-shaped beak and long legs was all I really felt was necessary to convey a cartoon flamingo.

Here are a few of the exploratory sketches I went off of for the final design.

Here's a watercolor of the final design I went with.

Step 02: The Sculpt

Usually I like to do a full character turnaround and model sheet before starting a sculpt, but the sculpter on this project, Barney Marquez (who's also head of puppets on Tumble Leaf), was able to sculpt the characters without needing them, which gave me more time to develop the world.

Mingo's parts were sculpted separately, so they could be molded in separate parts. Chavant clay (medium, nsp) was used and the eyeballs are acrylic spheres.

Step 03: The Mold
Here's the head placed in a box made out of foam core, getting ready to be poured full of silicone to create the mold.

Here are the head and body molds after they had been cut open and fitted with connections for the limbs.

Step 04: Casting and Armature

Once the molds have been cut open, the plugs are set in and then the mold is closed up again ready to be poured. I used a two-part plastic called smooth cast, to cast the puppets. Here's a photo of Mingo structurally assembled, ready for fabrication.

The limbs are made out of aluminum armature wire, and wrapped in an athletic bandage before paint.

Step 05: Fabrication

Once the puppet has been assembled, it was very labor intensive to glue all this furry fabric to the body parts. Lots of tests were done to figure out the best way to convey feathers in miniature. A lot of fabrics just didn't look right.

Once all the fur was glued on a "puffed up," it was then snipped snipped to length, and flattened to look like feathers.

Step 06: Paint

The puppet was painted to the proper pink I wanted (it was a coincidence that the fabric was also pink) using an airbrush. And then highlights were added to the feathers to help give variation and depth using a dry brush technique.

Step 07: Lids and Mouth

I didn't document this aspect of the process very well, but the eyelids are vacuum formed plastic, using a small vacuum form machine, and the beak was sculpted and cast.

Step 08: The Finished Puppet

Once Mingo was assembled, I was able to put her on a test stage and make sure that she looked good in-camera. And there you have it, a fully functioning puppet ready for animation!

In my next post, I'll be documenting the techniques I used to bring Allie to life, as her process was completely different than Mingo's and a caused me a lot more grief. haha

Let me know in the comments if this was way too long and I'll try to condense these in the future. Any feedback regarding my format is super helpful for me as these posts evolve.

Thanks for peepin!