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.

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: