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labricoleuseI have a lot of complex projects in the works right now--shoes, hats, the wire crinolines from the last post--but by far my favorite is building the enormous girl-grabbing puppet arms of Audrey II, the carnivorous plant star of the musical Little Shop of Horrors.
If you are familiar with the show, you know that it's all about the plant puppets, and that because the plant grows exponentially larger in each scene, the show requires four different plant puppets--two handheld potted-plant-sized ones, a large walkaround-sized one (though since it's in a pot, the puppeteer doesn't actually walk around in it), and an enormous one that requires three and then five puppeteers to manipulate it due to its sprawling prehensile "arms".
The Drama department of Durham Academy, a prestigious private K-12 school in Durham, NC, is producing the show this semester with sets designed by Zach Hamm, who also is the ATD at my work. They are working with the licensing and production company Music Theatre International, from whom they are also renting the plants. The set of four puppets was originally built by Character Translations, Inc.. The rental package consists of the four plants and plans for building the two sets of grabbing arms. (Presumably the plans are offered instead of renting built versions of the arms themselves due to the need to accomodate varying stage sizes and different actor-faces for the victim-flowers.) Zach and his construction team were unable add building the arms on top of their work on the set itself, so he asked if i'd be interested in doing it, and i ask you: does the sun come up in the morning?
YES, i was definitely interested in doing it!
Image copyright Character Translations Inc. and Musical Theatre International
There they are, the four puppets! The arms i'm building go with the largest one, who has two shortish (meaning, 8' long) ones in the penultimate scene, and then ideally, two ENORMOUS ones that feature flowers with human faces of Audrey's victims in the finale. There were going to have to be some changes to the designs of the large arms, and I didn't feel it was going to be possible to build the small arms as drafted *&* troubleshoot a redesign of the large arms in the time required, so our compromise was that the costume designer would make flower-petal headdresses for the actors portraying the victims, and i would make four of the small arms instead of two different sets of arms. That way, Audrey is still observably larger in the finale (four arms instead of two), and everybody's happy.
Here's what i had to go on:
Designs copyright Martin P. Robinson, 1982
These are the original drafts of Martin P. Robinson's macropuppet design for the 1982 stage production. They were drafted by Katy Orrick and revised in 1998 by Michael Kelly. 1/2" on the drafting is equal to 1' in real life. The plans illustrate how the arms are manipulated and indicate materials used in construction. I didn't have to start from complete scratch, but i did have to figure out how i was going to be able to source the materials quickly and keep it within the budget.
I spent the past week obtaining all the materials necessary for the project, and today was the first day of work on it. One of my graduate students, Amanda Phillips, came in to assist me.
The first order of the day was to figure out the actual dimensions of all the various parts of the arms. Here i've taken the original draft and measured out some relevant distances. Amanda and i took 10' lengths of 3/4" diameter PVC plumbing pipe and marked out on them with Sharpies the locations of the two twiglets, the end of the arm itself, and where the bend in the handle should happen. I decided not to cut the pipe and put the bend in until the arms are complete and the director has a chance to come look at them--it may be that the changes in the choreography mean that it would be more advantageous to leave the handle straight. We also had a few laughs about touching things with ten-foot poles, since with four ten-foot poles on-hand, the jokes just told themselves, really.
Here you can see some of the markings on the pipes.
So, once the poles were marked with scale notations, it was time to attach the armature--think of it as the skeleton. Man-eating plant arm-bones and finger-bones, if you will. What did we use for armature wire? Well, if you need to keep costs low and you have an enormous costume storage facility like we do, you use a bunch of bent-out-of-shape earmarked-for-discard wire hangers. Hanger wire is ideal because it has a great deal of rigidity and strength, but is not SO strong that human hands cannot bend it as-needed.
We used a Dremel (hand-held router tool) with a drill bit to drill small holes completely through the pipes. Then we stuck our finger-bone armature through the holes and bent about 3-4" lengths of it down parallel to the pipe. These anchors were then lashed down with wrappings of 21-gauge craft wire and mummified in duct tape, so:
The twig-bone's connected to the...arm-bone...
When it came to the "hand" itself, Amanda and i wondered--should the thumb and the fingers all come from the same radial area (as with a grabber-claw on a steamshovel), or should the thumb be offset lower (like a perversion of a human hand)? The drafting doesn't really make it clear. The best way to deal with these kinds of questions is to make a miniature. It doesn't have to be beautiful, it can be ghetto as all get-out--what it needs to do is show you in 3D what your idea looks like. Here's my Barbie-sized Audrey-hand:
This is the configuration we decided on. Since Audrey the plant has to actually grab at people running around on the stage, we figured with the offset thumb it would be easier for people to more realistically get "caught" by the hands than if they were all on the same radius. Nothing cramps your suspension of disbelief like someone having to pull the fingers of a hand around themselves while screaming something like "No, help, don't eat me!" Then it was time for Amanda and i to don our safety goggles--with 3' lengths of rigid wire waving around the shop on the ends of 10' poles, it was going to be some prime eye-poking territory.
Here i am affixing the fingers and thumb armatures. [1]
Amanda stars in a scale-and-perspective shot.
It was hard to get enough distance on this in the hallway, but it now occurs to me we could have taken it into the rehearsal hall and gotten a better photo illustrating scale when held by a person. But, whatever, i'll do that once it's got flesh and skin on it. (Is it still "flesh" and "skin" if it is a plant arm? Hmm.)
This is where we're at so far. I figured i'd post at this point because it's already quite a photo-heavy process. There will be a second post sometime between now and the end of the month detailing how these get finished. They're going to get sleeved in foam, carved and shaped, mulled with batting, then skinned over with stretchy fabric. Then they'll get airbrushed and hand-painted with fabric paints, and then they'll go off to Durham, to grab terrified teenagers and cram them down the gullet of the plant! You'll never know then that inside, what you've got is basically just a bunch of coat-hangers stuck to a piece of plumbing pipe. Ha! I gotta say, having seen the original production as a kid, it's gratifying to know that, according to the plans, the original Audrey arms were essentially something pretty much just like this. Cool that 25 years later here i am building my own set of them.
Stay tuned for the resolution of this project, and those promised posts on shoes and hats, too...
Oh, and: the show runs February 15-18, so if you are in the area go check it out! Tickets are free to the public.
[1] In the background of this photo you can see on my bulletin board the movie poster for Long Distance, the feature film for which i designed costumes, which is out now on DVD, available through Netflix! It's no Citizen Kane or Apocalypse Now, but i'm pretty proud of how it turned out. If you dig scary movies, you might enjoy it.
If you are familiar with the show, you know that it's all about the plant puppets, and that because the plant grows exponentially larger in each scene, the show requires four different plant puppets--two handheld potted-plant-sized ones, a large walkaround-sized one (though since it's in a pot, the puppeteer doesn't actually walk around in it), and an enormous one that requires three and then five puppeteers to manipulate it due to its sprawling prehensile "arms".
The Drama department of Durham Academy, a prestigious private K-12 school in Durham, NC, is producing the show this semester with sets designed by Zach Hamm, who also is the ATD at my work. They are working with the licensing and production company Music Theatre International, from whom they are also renting the plants. The set of four puppets was originally built by Character Translations, Inc.. The rental package consists of the four plants and plans for building the two sets of grabbing arms. (Presumably the plans are offered instead of renting built versions of the arms themselves due to the need to accomodate varying stage sizes and different actor-faces for the victim-flowers.) Zach and his construction team were unable add building the arms on top of their work on the set itself, so he asked if i'd be interested in doing it, and i ask you: does the sun come up in the morning?
YES, i was definitely interested in doing it!
Image copyright Character Translations Inc. and Musical Theatre International
There they are, the four puppets! The arms i'm building go with the largest one, who has two shortish (meaning, 8' long) ones in the penultimate scene, and then ideally, two ENORMOUS ones that feature flowers with human faces of Audrey's victims in the finale. There were going to have to be some changes to the designs of the large arms, and I didn't feel it was going to be possible to build the small arms as drafted *&* troubleshoot a redesign of the large arms in the time required, so our compromise was that the costume designer would make flower-petal headdresses for the actors portraying the victims, and i would make four of the small arms instead of two different sets of arms. That way, Audrey is still observably larger in the finale (four arms instead of two), and everybody's happy.
Here's what i had to go on:
Designs copyright Martin P. Robinson, 1982
These are the original drafts of Martin P. Robinson's macropuppet design for the 1982 stage production. They were drafted by Katy Orrick and revised in 1998 by Michael Kelly. 1/2" on the drafting is equal to 1' in real life. The plans illustrate how the arms are manipulated and indicate materials used in construction. I didn't have to start from complete scratch, but i did have to figure out how i was going to be able to source the materials quickly and keep it within the budget.
I spent the past week obtaining all the materials necessary for the project, and today was the first day of work on it. One of my graduate students, Amanda Phillips, came in to assist me.
The first order of the day was to figure out the actual dimensions of all the various parts of the arms. Here i've taken the original draft and measured out some relevant distances. Amanda and i took 10' lengths of 3/4" diameter PVC plumbing pipe and marked out on them with Sharpies the locations of the two twiglets, the end of the arm itself, and where the bend in the handle should happen. I decided not to cut the pipe and put the bend in until the arms are complete and the director has a chance to come look at them--it may be that the changes in the choreography mean that it would be more advantageous to leave the handle straight. We also had a few laughs about touching things with ten-foot poles, since with four ten-foot poles on-hand, the jokes just told themselves, really.
Here you can see some of the markings on the pipes.
So, once the poles were marked with scale notations, it was time to attach the armature--think of it as the skeleton. Man-eating plant arm-bones and finger-bones, if you will. What did we use for armature wire? Well, if you need to keep costs low and you have an enormous costume storage facility like we do, you use a bunch of bent-out-of-shape earmarked-for-discard wire hangers. Hanger wire is ideal because it has a great deal of rigidity and strength, but is not SO strong that human hands cannot bend it as-needed.
We used a Dremel (hand-held router tool) with a drill bit to drill small holes completely through the pipes. Then we stuck our finger-bone armature through the holes and bent about 3-4" lengths of it down parallel to the pipe. These anchors were then lashed down with wrappings of 21-gauge craft wire and mummified in duct tape, so:
The twig-bone's connected to the...arm-bone...
When it came to the "hand" itself, Amanda and i wondered--should the thumb and the fingers all come from the same radial area (as with a grabber-claw on a steamshovel), or should the thumb be offset lower (like a perversion of a human hand)? The drafting doesn't really make it clear. The best way to deal with these kinds of questions is to make a miniature. It doesn't have to be beautiful, it can be ghetto as all get-out--what it needs to do is show you in 3D what your idea looks like. Here's my Barbie-sized Audrey-hand:
This is the configuration we decided on. Since Audrey the plant has to actually grab at people running around on the stage, we figured with the offset thumb it would be easier for people to more realistically get "caught" by the hands than if they were all on the same radius. Nothing cramps your suspension of disbelief like someone having to pull the fingers of a hand around themselves while screaming something like "No, help, don't eat me!" Then it was time for Amanda and i to don our safety goggles--with 3' lengths of rigid wire waving around the shop on the ends of 10' poles, it was going to be some prime eye-poking territory.
Here i am affixing the fingers and thumb armatures. [1]
Amanda stars in a scale-and-perspective shot.
It was hard to get enough distance on this in the hallway, but it now occurs to me we could have taken it into the rehearsal hall and gotten a better photo illustrating scale when held by a person. But, whatever, i'll do that once it's got flesh and skin on it. (Is it still "flesh" and "skin" if it is a plant arm? Hmm.)
This is where we're at so far. I figured i'd post at this point because it's already quite a photo-heavy process. There will be a second post sometime between now and the end of the month detailing how these get finished. They're going to get sleeved in foam, carved and shaped, mulled with batting, then skinned over with stretchy fabric. Then they'll get airbrushed and hand-painted with fabric paints, and then they'll go off to Durham, to grab terrified teenagers and cram them down the gullet of the plant! You'll never know then that inside, what you've got is basically just a bunch of coat-hangers stuck to a piece of plumbing pipe. Ha! I gotta say, having seen the original production as a kid, it's gratifying to know that, according to the plans, the original Audrey arms were essentially something pretty much just like this. Cool that 25 years later here i am building my own set of them.
Stay tuned for the resolution of this project, and those promised posts on shoes and hats, too...
Oh, and: the show runs February 15-18, so if you are in the area go check it out! Tickets are free to the public.
[1] In the background of this photo you can see on my bulletin board the movie poster for Long Distance, the feature film for which i designed costumes, which is out now on DVD, available through Netflix! It's no Citizen Kane or Apocalypse Now, but i'm pretty proud of how it turned out. If you dig scary movies, you might enjoy it.
