Joel Abels out of Fresno, California contacted me on a Wednesday night. By Thursday we had discussed what he needed: James and the Giant Peach puppets. When did he need them? Two weeks from that Thursday so that gave me a week to make something work for him.
I love a good challenge and with this project, I haven’t been building as much lately, so it was a great kick start to getting back into my workshop and getting things going again.
There are five characters in the musical that are usually puppets: Earthworm, Centipede, Ms. Spider, Ladybug, and Grasshopper. I have never made bug puppets before (or arachnids) so this was going to be fun. I started off creating designs of what I wanted. Through the entire time I kept telling myself “Keep it simple. Keep it simple.” because my tendency is to overcomplicate or think I can actually accomplish more than I realistically have time for. For example: moving mouth and eye mechanisms take a lot longer when you want to make them out of a hard material with a trigger attached, as opposed to cutting out a mouth in foam that a person just has to use their hand with. (Thanks Kevin Augustine!)
So I kept it simple. My Uncle Tony had a lot of black reticulated foam that he said I could use for my puppets a while back, so materials were basically donated. I built five large puppets and six small puppets. In about a week. I got them out the door with enough time so that the students had a few days to rehearse with them and get to feel them out. I used a lot of hot glue and rough cuts, so I would really love to build these puppets again and take my time to make the moving pieces and more articulation. I want to push myself to have a better grasp of the mechanical possibilities in puppet building.
I’ve attached a few photos below of some of the puppets. When Joel sends along some performance photos, I will share those as well.
