The Mysterious Traveller

It has been ten months since my time concluded on My Grandfather's Demons (Os  Demônios do meu Avô) where the final puppet was rigged and the last tie-down was painfully screwed into the bottom of Rosa's foot. These characters bear the visual aches and tears that the majority of the team felt throughout this production. This is by no means a slight against the film; it is simply the nature of such scale of work. But when you frantically start to use super glue to fix props to a puppets silicone hand, you know that things are looking bleak. For the record, we normally take the time to screw said prop into the 2mm access point in the palm of the hand, but on that particular day I definitely remember thinking fuck this shit (I can this perfectly in Portuguese; it's a frequent saying). The feature film itself has been greatly received across the globe, being part of numerous international animation and film festivals including A nnecy in France and Fantasia in Montreal, Quebec ...

Lets get right into it, shall we? I've been lucky enough to learn more about ball and socket armatures since working with the Twirlywoo puppets for MacKinnon and Saunders. And when I rejoined the team at Scream Street back in January, I was stationed in the puppet maintanence department, which gave me the perfect opportunity to continue learning about these armatures and begin work on my very own*. I could finally combine my soldering skills with my character design in a very raw creation that would eventually become Old Man Prickles (TBC - however, as I did not revise this choice over the subsequent months, I soon became rather fond if it).  * if you ever get the chance to work for a different department (be it rigging, puppet maintenance or costumes etc) then it's really worth taking. Working in a studio environment, where there is a certain amount of added pressure, will be the best place to learn a new skill, even if you're a complete newb. Scream ...