Puppet Mechansisms
Dog Legs
Each leg on my Black Dog of Hergest Puppet moves individually. Two puppeteers control two legs each. A trigger on the handle pulls the jointed leg up into position, then gravity pulls it back down with the aim to look like a realistic walking/prowling dog.
For the front legs I used the dog leg mechanism from the Jimmy Grimes Puppet Mechanisms book, which I then altered for use on the back legs.
Leg Mechanism Design
Front legs
Cardboard maquette of dog leg.
CAD drawing of peices to create scaled up pattern
leg cut out of reclaimed ply
Finished leg relaxed and extended with stoppers to stop overextending
Back Legs
I used the front leg as a guide for the size of the back legs, and drew out similar shapes in card as a mock up. Back legs move differently to front ones so I had to reverse engineer the front leg mech to pull the back leg up in the right direction, but still have the paw moving down.
Seeing the ply leg against the body
Finished back leg before render. I added stoppers made from dowell to stop the leg over extending
First test run with both legs on and strung up. I ended up changing how the front legs attached to the axel to give it more shoulder movement, as the paws kept getting caught on the floor
Finished puppet out for a test drive!
Seagull wings
The Gull puppet’s wings have two separate mechanisms. One opens out the wings while the other flaps. It is puppeteered by one person, who controls the wings with two triggers on the handle.
Wing opening mechanism design. The wing is made of two parts that lay over each other, connected by a bolt. The cord lays on the outside edge through eye hooks and tied on the end. The cord pulls the wings outwards, and elastic pulls it back into place.
Card Maquette of wing
I made the wings from mountboard, to make sure they were lightweight, and super glued the eye hooks in.
This was the first attempt at stringing it all up. For the flapping mech, I used leather as a hinge, but a proper metal hinge would be better
I used some plastic pipe and secured them to screws with worbla to create a taller channel for the wing flapping strings for more leverage and make it easier to pull the wing upwards.
Two triggers. Both easily controlled by one hand, separated by washers. The bottom one is for the flapping mech, the top is for the opening mech.
The Seagull (Dr Franken-Gull) in action!