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One Snowy Night Puppets in the Making
The remit of these puppet was an unusual one. They were to have no external rods. They needed to be able to stand up by themselves on a raked stage without looking dead as there were only 2 puppeteers operating 11 puppets and of course have enough movement to make them come alive!

Mole

Carving
The heads and the bottom halves of puppets were carved out of reticulated foam. It is a very useful light material and has the great advantage that is doesn't tear. This way you can carve the outer form and the just set bits of wood into it for the moving parts.
All the body parts
Drawing
All the puppets started with a profile and front-on drawing at the exact size they would be. This was in order to work out how much foam is required and also to be a guide for creating the form and the internal structures.


Inserting structures
Here you can see the pelvis of the fox where ply has been inset so that a dowel can be passed through to hang the legs off, a central bendy rod is fixed which will go up to join the head and a handle is created at the back.
Joining the body parts together
On fox and badger, I created a kind of spinal column out of sliced foam around the the central rod that joined the head to the body. In addition to this I added elastic from the head to the spinal column and the handle at the back to support the heads.





Head Handle
The handle in the back of the head is inset and the foam carved out around it so that the kind can fit in. All of this was covered by fur so it was not visible.
Finished badger
Here badger is doing the raked stage test. The puppets had be able to stand on a sloping stage so they needed to have weight put in the base at the back to stop them falling forwards.

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