The main objective when I started making the Plan B puppets was mobility. I really loved the idea of my film taking place around my living room, so my puppets had to be able to stand on their own, and give the illusion of walking, gripping, climbing, reaching etc.
I got these mannequins many years ago and admittedly hadn’t used them all that much. I realised they were perfect “skeletons” to build my puppets from. The only issue of course is that the purpose of these mannequins is to replicate accurate human proportions in which it draw from. In other words, they looked too normal.
I still really wanted my characters to in body the style of Tim Burton.
I had the idea to use clay and other materials to shape the body and make certain features more exaggerated, however the more I built onto the mannequins, the more immobile they’d be, and as stated before mobility was the priority. The one part of the body I could shape however I wanted without effecting movement was the head. The head could hold quite a lot and still be able to turn all the way around. This is when I needed to rethink the design of my characters completely.
Not only did I now have to bring 3 characters down to 2, but I also had to design them with the head being the main focus. I already had my heart set on the mouse being a key element of the story, as it had been for every single project so far. I didn’t really want to do the mouse and the old man, or the woman or the child nor did I want to do the mouse and the dog or cat, because as I’ve demonstrated in previous projects, I think these characters work better when together. The mouse and the turnip however really spoke to me, I think because they are both the odd ones out in the story. The turnip is the star of story, while the mouse is the lesson.
so now it was a question of how do i design my ‘mouse and turnip heads’. I figured the mouse head would have to be done in clay, as I had to mould it to look like a mouse but it also had to be strong enough to both stick to the mannequin and also not fall off when I’m moving it around. I looked at animals found in the stop motion videos that inspired me, mostly focusing on Tim Burton. Rats and mice are used a lot in his films due to their dark connotations. If you view the three images below, all taken from Burton films, fur is never added to the models but detail and texture still makes the creatures look dirty and gives them a ‘finished’ appearance. I decided to not paint my mouse head, and to instead add small lines with the pointy part of an earring to give it texture, as if it had fur but it dirty and stuck down to the skin. Another reason I didn’t want to paint it is because i really liked the plain look in “On the other side of the wood” animation, where the clay characters remained clay.
As for the turnip character, the most realistic method was to actually use a real turnip. I then stuck a pen into it to make two holes for eyes. I did the same thing with the mouse. This made the eyes look lifeless yet structured the face. Turnips are rather soft and get bruised very easily. Just from the creating process my turnip already looked like it had been chucked away. This gave me the idea to return to my rubbish idea.. from my original rubbish idea.
in plan A I explained that one thing that made filming really difficult was trying to film in a recycling bin, where i not only had to balance a puppet that couldn’t stand properly, but i also had to balance the piled up plastic in the bin itself. But of course you would never discard a turnip in a recycling bin, and that’s when I had the idea to use my other bin, with a vertical shape that my character could emerge from. This then helped me to decide what to decorate the rest of the body with. I cut up lose bits of packaging and wrappers and stuck them to the body frame using cello tape. I was gonna do the same thing with the mouse, but I wanted my characters be unique from each other.
I instead chose to decorate the mouse with leaves and flowers off a dying plant. I was really happy with the result as I feel like it gave the models more character. If the turnip was wearing rubbish because he emerges from the rubbish, it made sense to me that the mouse was wearing plants because it lives among the plants. And lucky for me we have an area on my counter where we keep a lot of our plants.
So I knew my film had to have the turnip climbing out of the rubbish, and then walking/climbing around my kitchen to eventually reach the counter with the flowers. Where the 2 characters meet.
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