How to make a remote-control sentient web-puppet by hacking Twitter, Google, Skype, Arduino and Processing!

Step 5: Designing the puppet head

Twitr_janus is named fairly predictably after Twitter, but also Janus: the Roman god of doorways and transitions. As good a name as any for a puppet driven by web doorways.

The main pen and ink drawing shows an intiial design, which was to make Twitr_janus a twin-headed puppet. (Janus was usually shown with two head or two faces, one looking forward, the other  backward.) This would allow the puppet operator the ability to look at both the audience and the puppet .

Eventually this was rejected for a number of reasons. Instead, a number of ideas were scribbled down to play with the look. Everyone has their own method for ideas-generating. I like fast sketching using either pencil, charcoal or ink and wash. This is mainly as they all allow lines or shading to be built up rapidly.



I wanted it to look quite grotesque, and at least a bit creepy! 

Some variations are shown.  Some of the ideas coming out appeared to have memory traces of the Brain from Pinky and the Brain...
The right hand one explored a large hinged-jaw version...



The abnormally large craniums in these sketches is not entirely just for grotesque effect. It is also because the puppet would eventually need to house servos and control circuitry and electronics...



Eventually one was chosen.
Based on this, a 3-d puppet head needed to be built, so a face was modelled in clay to cast as a mould. Here's the big lump of clay...



And here's the finished model, ready for casting. Note - the eye sockets are wider than the original design to allow the eventual eyeballs to have a greater field of vision. If you look carefully, you can see that the model is resting on a perspex turntable (as used for cake decoration). It makes it easier to access when modelling.



To get the final face mask, a mould was taken from the model using silicon casting latex...



For full details of how the silicon mould was made with a cardboard casing see this post:

makingweirdstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/making-silicon-latex-mould-for.html

The head was built up in two main parts: The face and the cranium. The face mask here is not the final version. It's one of several latex copies made during testing. It is being used here as a template to gauge how big the skull should be and to carve it to fit...



The polystyrene was covered in several coats of laminated papier mache (brown paper and PVA). The polystyrene is removed to form a hollow cranium

The final hard face was created from the silicon mould (see previous step). The moulding material used was hot glue. This was melted into the mould and left to set.  

Here you can see the two parts before joining...



And below after the two halves have been joined. You can see that the lower lip has been cut out and hinged to allow mouth movement for the puppet later...
 


For more details of how this head was built up see:

makingweirdstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/making-twitrjanus-skull.html

For details of papier mache techniques see this post:

makingweirdstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/head-for-pantomime-goose-costume-part-2.html