Treasure Island - Capt'n Flint Parrots

Hello again dear readers,

So, treasure island!

Well I had finished making my/Long John Silvers wooden leg and now I needed to make the parrot.

My original idea for the Captain Flint parrot was a traditional rod puppet, the was sort of mangy, and featherless, with a big scar down its face. However, Caroline Sharman (the director) was concerned of the puppetry demands of such a puppet (and rightly so) with the adult actors having to play many characters, and the kids needed for many of the dances and simply my height at 6' 5'' meant that having a traditional rod puppet being operated by somebody else, was not going to be possible with this production. Simon Higlet the designer also wanted the parrot to be realistic looking.

So it was back to the drawing boards.

I thought about a self operated puppet that would be attached to me and I could operate from my pocket via the medium of cables and springs. This would have worked, but... for a lot of the time the parrot would look dead... it would also have limited movement. and look very fake and puppet like as a result, or simply like a stuffed dead parrot. It would also not be easily removed from me.

So I looked into Animatronics.  Animatronic kits for such a parrot cost a small fortune that would have taken almost the entire of the shows budget. I then remembered my days playing with furbys, and quickly started looking for animatronic toys.... and I discovered an amazing toy called Squwarkers Mccaw. these are full size parrots, that sit and move, talk and blink like real parrots, they react to touch, sound, voice and light and are totally self contained battery operated toys. Although new, fairly expensive... I thought a couple of second hand ebay ones would be perfect. and perfect they were.

These parrots were terrific. and not only did they look and move amazingly, they were hard wearing (being toys) and remote controlled and reprogram-able. so I could program the toy to say what i needed it to and it would respond to the appropriate line from the actor (this proved slightly unreliable in practice) but it was still a great solution to the self operated traditional rod puppet.

Once I had the toys I then set about recovering them. As lovely as they were, they needed to be less toy like a more real. so some paint work and varnish later they were 'realed' up as it were.

I then designed a way of getting the parrot to sit on my shoulder, then with the help of my dad and his awesome metal work machine we build a contraption for the parrot to sit on. We created a metal plate that had two spikes coming out it it these ran up into the feet of the parrot. there was also a metal strop that ran down my back with a bolt attached that again stuck out of the back of my costume. To the parrots themselves, we attached a metal strip that ran through its tail. This clipped effortlessly to the bolt on my back when the parrot was placed on my shoulder. This held the bird in place, but also meant it was quickly removable.

In practice this worked great when just walking about but when i had to do some intense moving around the demand was too great and the parrot would fall off or to the side. So we added a couple of ties that helped tie the parrots feet to the spikes and it stayed firmly put... chatting and chirping and looking very real!

The final hurdle i had to cross, was another parrot, that flew. So i returned to the idea of a traditional rod parrot. only this time it had one simple purpose and that was to fly. I had made Huge flying seagull puppets for James and the Giant Peach   so i adapted the flying wing contraption i had developed for those for a smaller more light weight parrot puppet. and again with the help of my dad and his awesome metal lathe we made the flying contraption which was sprung loaded with elastic bands. the effect - pull the rope - the wings flapped down. release it they sprung up. nice and fluid and realistically. Modeled below by Damian:

the body of the parrot i built out of styrofoam, and covered in fake fur that i painted to texture and match it to the animatronic parrots. the feet and eyes were super sculpey... and the beak painted and varnished card. it had to be light as it would be operated by kids... and  we had a flying captain flint.

operated below and in the show by Declan:

So with the parrots built and silvers leg... and later I made a palm tree for the set and a few other bits and bobs... it was time for me to pick up my script, throw on a tricorn and start rehearsals as Long john silver.

over and out.

xx

Treasure Island - Silvers Leg

Dear Readers,

It has been a busy busy few weeks. Treasure Island has been filling my life in many many ways... Late October I started having meetings with Caroline Sharman at the New Theatre Royal Portsmouth and a few emails with designer Simon Higlet and costumer Naomi Gibbs I started work on some puppets and props for the production. This included a wooden leg I would have to wear as Long John Silver.

Simon and I both agreed it should be a bit like an action man leg... pivoted in the middle. this would enable me to have some movement in the leg.

I made a basic structure for the leg out of a dense blue foam, a type of flexible styrofoam, the sort of stuff you would pad a seat out of.

the leg was in three parts the upper/thigh part, the lower leg/shin part, and the foot. it had to look like it was made from wood and look accurate when bent/pivoted.

 This is the leg partly painted. once i had constructed the shape of the leg, I heated a knife and sires to an extream heat and used (in a well ventilated space) the hot knife to carve into the plastic foam.

I took the opportunity with the leg to create something that wasn't just a wooden leg, but also had a story. i liked the idea of silver spending his spare moments at sea just whittling things into his wooden leg. so i drew up a design of an octopus reaching its arms around the leg and up towards a ship on the waves. i also carved certain character names into the leg. names of silver friend from the book, like flint, blind pew etc.

once i had carved this design i then needed to make the leg look wooden, so i did this by carving grain and slits through the leg and through the carvings. I also had to carve out the picot points to give the pivot illusion. then it was time to paint the leg. a couple of white undercoats, and then with the wood effect paint work.

The is the leg on. The lower part had a zip running up the back hidden under a material flap painted with the same wood effect. Once I had painted the leg  i used tin foil on the pivot joints to give them a metal look. i then varnished the leg several times to give it strength and also a nice wooden sheen. then i had to make the foot.

I used one of my old Crocs Boots, as a base, then stuck foam over it and carved into it. Using Evostick (i used a lot of this on the project) i stuck some foil to felt and cut out some metal bits to dress the wooden leg. in an attempt to make the leg and foot look functional and hard wearing.

with the foot done the last thing to do was age the leg. I worked from the foot upwards, give the foot especially as slightly old moldy look as if its gotten damp a lot, and traveled that up the leg. i rusted the metal parts, and adorned the leg with some leather strops and nail head to make it look like its bee repaired and held together.

this is the leg on:

now all i needed was the rest of the costume, a script and a parrot!

Parrots were my other obsession... check back for more updates on treasure island !

Chris xx

Harry Potter Bowtruckle Creature Sculpture.

A Bowtruckle From Harry Potter!

Hello!

Ok, as promised, This is The First Part of my Bowtruckle Tutorial!

You can click on the pictures to see bigger, better, high quality versions of them

For a long time I have wanted to try making creature sculptures, but I have found my previous excursions disappointing. So I did some research into what materials to use and I thought I would give Super Sculpy a try and see what happens.

What follows is my process of how I made my creature. It is entirely my trial and error process having never attempted this sort of thing before. I just wanted to try.

I have be re-reading the Harry Potter books before the final book is launched and the Bowtruckle jumped out at me as a creature that might be fun to create.

So here we go:

1: Research

The thing I did was a bit of research on the Creature in question. I read the passages in the Harry Potter Books referring to them and the descriptions in the little Harry Potter related book ‘Fantastic Beasts and where to find them’.

2: Sketch/Design

There really isn’t a lot of detail about how they look, which is good because although there is a general idea I still have plenty of creative freedom. So I started with some rough sketches of what sprang to mind. Until I finished with a sketch of a Bowtruckle that I drew in full size (about 9 inches tall).

Here is that sketch:

Then I gathered some research objects. I wanted it to be a Bowtruckle from an Oak Tree (I like Oak Trees) and so I went and collected some leaves and twigs, bits of bark and acorns, to reference to throughout this process.

3: Getting Started/Armature

So… I had to start with an armature. Here is the picture:

There are a whole range of ways to do this but the arms and legs of my Bowtruckle were going to be quite thin so I needed and thin but strong steel wire, to help give them some strength against accidental knocks. So checking the frame size against my drawing (not too big there’s a lot to be built onto it) I built a simple skeleton to build my model on. The joints were silver soldered (circled red) because it’s flipping strong! But that sort of strength isn’t always necessary. It probably wasn’t necessary here. I then used a bit of scrap wood from a skip (a bit of old teak in this case) drilled two small holes, poked the two bits of wire at the bottom of the leg ins and glued it there with two part Areldite. (Available in most hardware stores and model Shops)

In order to save clay, and to give the clay something to grip to I bulked up the wire frame with Tin foil – simple crumpling it onto the frame is enough to make it stick.

Picture:

4: Working With Clay/ Sculpting

Then I started stick very thin strips of clay onto the frame – a bit like paper mache’. (I am making the hands and head separately to get good detail on them, The head being a simple circle of wire with a bit for the neck with a ball of tin folio wrapped over it)

Picture:

Now I can roughly see the position of the frame. Now is a good time to correct this without damaging any sculpture.

Then I put chunks of clay all over the frame to bulk out areas and thicken parts, giving shape – like biceps, pecks, jaw and chin, forehead, thighs, tummey. All the thick parts of the body – like strips of muscle.

Then the sculpting begins.

Picture.

I don’t have any sculpting tools so I simply made some by curling over different thicknesses of wire into tiny loops. These seemed to serve their purpose well.

Rolled out some tiny balls of Super Sculpy and cooked them, I used these for eyes. You can cook super Sculpy many times. Details further down.

This mean that you can made delicate things like fingers teeth and ands separately and cook them and then attack them to the model and sculpt around them without damaging them. Which is exactly what I did. I made the hands and eyes separately then attached them.

When using Super Sculpy you can get little rough bits when you sculpt and carve. To smooth out the edges, the get rid of these blemishes you can use a soft brush dipped in something like turpentine and gently brush over your model. This method does not damage your sculpt but does slightly smooth it over giving you a lovely smooth finish, without any bits. It also makes it clear where there is mistakes and what eeds more work.

When I did the head I did all the basic detail, smoothed it out with turpentine and then built more detail onto what I already had. This seemed a good way to work. However should you use this method. Once you have brushed your sculpt I don’t recommend sculpting it for a good hour or so, because the turpentine leaves the very top surface very soft, and you could do some damage. Its better to leave it for an hour or so until the surface is firm again, then start your re-sculpt.

Once I had sculpted the head and attached it to the base, I used an old cheap little hairdryer to heat up the face for a while, this meant that the topmost layer of sculpt was slightly cooked, so I wouldn’t mess up the face as I attach the big leaves coming out of the head.

Picture:

5: Cooking!

Once sculpted I cooked him.

130 degrees for 15 minutes for every 6 mm (thickness) of clay. - keep an eye out and try not to over cook or burn your work.

Picture:

Then I worked on the base and cooked him again. You can keep cooking sculpy with no problems.

The finished model:

Now for painting! - - Update Soon!

NOTE::

Creating something like this take loads of time. So be prepared to be patient and go away and return to your project. Take time in the sculpt, and time in the designing process. A good design will help you sculpt. This sculpt took me about 12-15 hours.

This was my trial and error method only… there are probably much better and more effective ways of sculpting like this, In fact I am sure there are professional sculptors who would roll their eyes if they saw this. This tutorial has been an overview. If you have any questions or comments please don’t hesitate to ask.