fabrication
Foam-carved puppet bodies with a stitched fabric skin
Armature
Definition
A budget- and student-tier method of building a puppet's soft body: two blocks of upholstery foam are glued around the front and back of a wire or ball-and-socket armature, then carved and snipped down to the character's silhouette before being covered in a stitched fabric skin -- an alternative to the cast silicone or foam-latex skins used on higher-budget productions (see Skin materials).
Overview
Where a feature production dresses its armatures in a cast resin or foam-latex core under a silicone outer skin (see Skin materials), a lower-budget or student build reaches the same result -- a posable body with the right silhouette and enough surface for paint or fabric to read on camera -- with carved foam and stitched cloth instead. The method does not require a mould shop: it needs an armature, foam, scissors, and a sewing kit, which is why it turns up on student films and small studios rather than feature productions with an in-house effects department.
Animator Ken A. Priebe documents the technique in *The Advanced Art of Stop-Motion Animation*, using puppets built by Bronwen Kyffin and Melanie Vachon for Lucas Wareing's student short *Ava* (Emily Carr University of Art + Design): two blocks of foam are spray-glued to the front and back of the metal armature, then the excess is carved away in large pieces first and trimmed to final shape with scissors. The puppet -- a 16-inch monster named Charlie, built around a ball-and-socket armature reinforced with plastic chest and waist blocks for leverage -- is then "skinned" by cutting fabric patterns to the carved shape and stitching them together over the foam, the same vocabulary (skinning, patterning) as garment-making rather than mould-casting.
Surface finishing borrows from both craft and costume technique. Charlie's striped pattern was made by masking sections of the stitched fabric with tape in the desired pattern, airbrushing white paint over the exposed areas, then peeling the tape away so the fabric's original darker colour remains as the stripe -- a resist technique, not hand-painted detail. The companion puppet Ava has separate treatment for hard and soft areas: her hands are aluminium wire shaped under fabric mittens, her plastic head is primed and airbrushed in skin tone with her eye areas masked off first, and her feet are cast in silicone -- showing that a foam-and-fabric body is routinely mixed with cast or moulded parts wherever the softer material can't do the job (a face needing replacement pieces, hands needing fine finger definition).
Facial performance on both puppets runs on interchangeable pieces rather than a sculpted, fixed expression: replacement eyes and mouths, made from Sculpey polymer clay, are coated on the back with Vaseline so they grip the puppet's face and can be peeled off and swapped between exposures without adhesive residue building up -- a lightweight alternative to the geared or magnetic replacement-face rigs used on larger productions (see Replacement face systems).
Workflow
- Glue two blocks of foam to the front and back of the finished armature.
- Carve away the excess foam in large pieces first, then trim to final shape with scissors, working outward from the armature's silhouette.
- Cut fabric patterns to the carved shape and stitch them together over the foam to form the puppet's skin.
- Mask any pattern detail (stripes, markings) with tape, airbrush paint over the exposed fabric, then remove the tape so the base fabric colour shows through as the pattern.
- Build replacement facial pieces (eyes, mouths) in Sculpey polymer clay and coat the back with Vaseline so they adhere to and release cleanly from the puppet's face between exposures.