Past Work: Mini-Mary

Here's a fun one from a while back.

We were asked to make a portrait-puppet of sorts.  She wanted the character to look like her, if she were a Muppet.

This puppet is an example of a mashup of two of our new puppet styles.  Mary's head is exemplary of our round, "Deluxe-Style" head.  Her body is similar to how our "Simple-Style" puppet bodies will be.  The hands were mittens by request.

Here's a bit of her in action:

We had been considering offering portrait-puppets like this for a while.  This this request was a bit different than what we had expected however, in that Mary had basically done the hard part for us.
As eager as we were to try our hand at puppet-izing someone, she knew exactly what she wanted, and had designs ready for us.

We absolutely love it when we get design drawings.

That made our job of finalizing the character design really easy.  There wasn't much for us to do other than be sure the shapes and proportions were right.

Past work: John's Grouch

Here's a fun character we built earlier this year:

This one is a live-hand, sack-monster type puppet with an eyebrow mechanism, meant to look like a Sesame-Street-Grouch-like character.
This is a great example of one of our "Full custom" puppets, with new patterns and shapes made from scratch.



Here's a video of the build progression, and some shots of the final puppet in action:

See some early design work after the break

Dan's Puppet- Past Work:

Here is another fun build we did a while ago:

This one was a unique challenge.  We ended up tailoring a sweatshirt into a live-hand arm for this character.  Which at the time, was the first time we had done something like that.

This character turned out to be several firsts for us.  This was the first time we shipped a puppet internationally, (though this didn't influence the build at all).  This was also marked the first attempt of our technology-assisted pattern making process, to create the skull for the puppet.  To get the shape we wanted, we modeled the head in a 3D software, and through some computer magic, we ended up with a pattern that made the head you see.

It turned out exactly like we wanted.
In retrospect, this method may have been better suited for a more complex shape.  However, we learned that we could use that process if we ever needed to make something particularly intricate.
(For example, we would likely use it for a particularly involved Full-Custom style request.)

Here is some footage we shot of him in action:

Small: a little puppet

This character was a custom order from quite a while ago.

These sketches are variations of the character based on a written description of him.

The sketches were based mostly on an explanation of the character's personality.  This description only gave a few specific physical traits, so much of it was open for interpretation.  I wanted to have a variety of options to choose between while still keeping maintaining the essence of the character's personality.

We settled on this for the final design:

We used this illustration as a guide while we built the character.

Here is how the little guy turned out:

Chef Character Ideas

I've had this idea brewing for a while now.

Two chef characters with some sort of cooking show.  One would be the old, wise, master chef, and the other would be a bumbling apprentice that despite their enthusiasm, can't seem to get things right.

After thinking it over for a bit, I realized that it would play out much like a combination between a Muppet-Labs and Swedish Chef sketch.

At first I was a bit disappointed in my apparent lack of originality.  The more I thought about it though, I thought it sounded like a whole lot of fun anyway.






Thinking about it now, I think it might be fun to work in a little bit of Mythbusters, as well, since Adam and Jamie's personalities fit so well into the dynamic of these characters.