HI! I am a guy who makes monsters and I want to share some of what I'm working on with my fellow puppet enthusiasts!

I am currently working on a series of music videos that will involve various puppeted prehistoric monsters rising out of the earth and conquering it. Here is a time lapse of me sculpting the head of one of them in polymer clay. The one in the video is just a simple hand puppet, but I have also made/am making 4 fully articulated creatures, some of which are full body suits and some of which are rod/line puppets. Anyway check out the video and let me know what you think!

(I strongly recommend you VIEW IN HD)



You can also see more of my work on my website and facebook page:
dontmesswithdinosaurs.com
http://www.facebook.com/historianhimself

thanks and enjoy!
-brian engh

Looks Awesome. Are all your teeth made from polymer too??

Wow - that's some awesome dinosaur work! How long did it actually take you to do the head?

I am very impressed! Great work. Only watched the video so far, I'll have to check your site and FB later. Finale puppet is cast foam right?

Sorry for the late reply.

Shawn: I I did a cast latex (liquid latex, not foam) puppet several years back that I'm actually recycling for this project with some slight modifications, but I'm not bothering with doing any others in cast latex because the whole sculpting/molding/casting process is prohibitively expensive and time consuming. The monster in the time-lapse is one of 10 monsters I'm building, two of which are full body costumes. Here's a series of photos showing the cast foam puppet i did a few years back and the process for that:


Na: I think the whole puppet took me about a weeks worth of solid work. The time lapse you see in the video was a day's worth of work.

Puppet Workshop: the teeth are polymer clay over segments of coat hanger wire.

That's really impressive for a week of work. No doubt needed just for the detail alone.

Is your "flexible understructure" masking tape? You're level of detail is very impressive. Loved seeing the full body test in the other thread.

haha yeah the flexible understructure on that puppet was tape and fabric and cardboard. i really didn't know what the hell I was doing with back then and didn't know where to get foam sheets etc. The puppet works OK, but the flexible understructure eventually broke-in to the point of being totally collapsed unless an arm was inside it... but it still added some thickness/stiffness to the otherwise very thin layer of latex rubber (which is basically the thickness of a face mask) that's over it.

You know sometimes you just have to work with what you have, and I think that is the sign of a true professional.