15ft dragon puppet for Shrek The Musical
in Puppets
I'm 2 years into puppet building on a large, semi-professional scale. I actually don't know when I make the leap into calling myself a professional... I was hired and paid... I won a national award for puppetry design and construction from the Kennedy Center yet it still feels like I haven't earned that title yet. Eventually.
Anyway- a friend of mine recently asked me to make their dragon for Shrek The Musical and I immediately said no because I was so intimidated by the scale, but after some thought I changed my mind and I'm so glad I did. This project pushed me as an artist and a person, and there were times I thought I would break, but I pushed through and I'm very pleased with the end result.
Shout-out to the How to Fabricate a Monster Suit course, Puppet Mechanism courses, Sculpting Basics and Foam Fabrication for holding my hand through this. 😅
I hope you enjoy her.
Her eyes have LED lights and switch from red to green via a remote off stage. Her wings *were* articulated via a pulley but they snapped during the installation and I didn't have time to repair it. Her eyes also opened and closed but that was other hiccup so I scraped it and they live open now.
Her skull is a PVC base with a standard eye blink mech. I patterned the head myself and used EVA to construct it.
Her body structure is also PVC with extra large hulahoops and plastic corset boning to make out a cage of sorts. The tail was my biggest engineering feat and took over 8 hours to get right. It was extremely important to me that the movement was just right. When she was on stage she was able to dance and fight Donkey and Shrek using her tail as a weapon.
This entire build took about 200 hours to complete.
I'm still learning and had to make a lot of compromises just because of my own limitations, but overall I'm extremely proud of her.
Anyway- a friend of mine recently asked me to make their dragon for Shrek The Musical and I immediately said no because I was so intimidated by the scale, but after some thought I changed my mind and I'm so glad I did. This project pushed me as an artist and a person, and there were times I thought I would break, but I pushed through and I'm very pleased with the end result.
Shout-out to the How to Fabricate a Monster Suit course, Puppet Mechanism courses, Sculpting Basics and Foam Fabrication for holding my hand through this. 😅
I hope you enjoy her.
Her eyes have LED lights and switch from red to green via a remote off stage. Her wings *were* articulated via a pulley but they snapped during the installation and I didn't have time to repair it. Her eyes also opened and closed but that was other hiccup so I scraped it and they live open now.
Her skull is a PVC base with a standard eye blink mech. I patterned the head myself and used EVA to construct it.
Her body structure is also PVC with extra large hulahoops and plastic corset boning to make out a cage of sorts. The tail was my biggest engineering feat and took over 8 hours to get right. It was extremely important to me that the movement was just right. When she was on stage she was able to dance and fight Donkey and Shrek using her tail as a weapon.
This entire build took about 200 hours to complete.
I'm still learning and had to make a lot of compromises just because of my own limitations, but overall I'm extremely proud of her.
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