The Making of a Giant Puppet - Part 6 (face tech)

All through the development process the what to do with the face has been a bit of an unknown,

So many options...

A:Building a physical face on the puppet

• Pros: Simple. Reliable. Always stays fixed on the face.
• Cons: Needs still more operators to make it work in an already crowd ground crew.

(photos Michelle McFarlane)

B:Projecting one from the ground that can be controlled from the operating desk and automatically tracking it to the head.

• Pros: Easy to set up control.
• Cons: Hard to convincingly projec t the face as it turns to profile. Auto tracking seems a bit inconsistant and laggy.

C:Mounting a projector inside the head itself that can be controlled remotely from the operating desk.

• Pros: Animated face will allways line up perfectly with the physical face.
• Cons: Battery powered projectors are relatively dim compared to AC ones (like 50 lumens compared to  10,000).

D: Some combination of the above

• Pros: Takes advantage the best of all possibilities.
• Cons: Too many options.

With a week to go we still havent decided yet...but damn I'm having a good time.



We also just addded a buch of coloured lights into the puppet which changes things a bit (making the non-brightness of the battery projector even more of an issue).

Tending towards option D but head awhirl with the possibilies. Whichever way we end up going Ive had a ball playing around with it.