Exclamation Points.

SketchFest was a hit! Everyone loved the puppets; people were really interested in how they were made and seeing them up close. Here are some snapshots of one of our rehearsals:

Puppets/SketchFest in review. Things I learned and developed, etc:

• Dollar store gloves work much better for puppet mouth control than socks.
• No matter what: You are going to burn yourself with the glue gun.
• I am much better at stitching now, but should still buy a sewing-machine.
• Cardboard and duct-tape actually can make pretty impressive puppets. Look into not being a cheap-skate (buy real foam).
• Just because you haven’t seen it in a puppet doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
• Everyone loves puppets.

I had a lot of trouble deciding what I wanted to do with the last puppet (number 6 of 6) for SketchFest. My original plan was to make a Cool Ranch Doritos bag but a couple obstacles came up.

1. People told me a doritos bag wouldn’t be exciting enough

2. Chris didn’t want me to write “Doritos” on it in order to avoid some sort of copyright infringement.

I had an internal struggle with both of these things and ultimately decided I didn’t care. I couldn’t think of a better puppet idea than Doritos and, although I left the word Doritos out of the final design, I still think it looks pretty great.

I didn’t take any pictures during the creation process of this puppet, but here is the final product.

I think we can all agree that Cool Ranch Doritos are the funniest type of Doritos out there. Amiright? I’ll probably add the word Doritos eventually, to make it even more obvious.

I’m hoping some idiots and I can use this bad-boy to make a commercial for the annual Dorito’s Super Bowl Commercial contest and win a million dollars. I don’t think any other submissions involved puppets, so this is a good start.

Internet: Don’t steal my idea. Please?

The cookie is done and it was time to move on to puppet #5. I decided to make a Cupcake instead of making an ice-cream cone. Luckily I was able to use the same fabric as before (pink / tan) and I felt like it would be a more enjoyable puppet to look at.

Designing the structure was a huge challenge. I made the bottom and top baseboards of the cupcake-stump first and then bent a front-face piece of cardboard onto it to pull it all together. Here is the frame of the stump:

That part was easy, but we all know the best and most important part is the tops - Top of the muffin to you! I made a basic cupcake frosting frame out of leftover DiGiorno boxes because they’re flexible and I clearly eat too much pizza.

I covered the whole thing with duct-tape to give it a complete surface. Surprising how good it looks once you get over the intense metallic color.

When I started covering the cupcake with fabric, I saw how cute it was. It was obvious that this puppet needed to be a girl. It was the princess, the smurfette of the bunch. Eyelashes made it a girl (hilarious, I know) and here is what the final product looks like:

This is the puppet I ultimately got to perform as in the show since it was my favorite.

I’m cranking out puppets pretty quickly at this point - and its getting more and more enjoyable. I went back home to CT for about 10 days and all I wanted was to get back and make more; I can’t believe how addicting it is. Luckily I’m on a deadline to get these done. Originally I had to make 6 puppets in 6 weeks. Taking out 2-3 between planning and time back in CT, my schedule was 6 puppets in 3 weeks. Awesome.

I decided to change the donut puppet into a chocolate chip cookie because I felt like the idea for the mouth of the donut being the donut-hole wouldn’t read as well as a real-life Chip’s Ahoy cookie from those “Smack Dab In The Middle” commercials.

Squeezed! In the Middle! Smack Dab! In the Middle!

I made the front and back panels of the cookie with cardboard circles of different diameters. Then I used bent cardboard to make the rounded edge portions of the cookie. Everything was duct-taped together an insane amount. Its actually pretty embarrassing how low-budget these puppets are. I think the total cost of these 6 puppets amounts to around $60. $10 per puppet is ridiculous. Here is what the internal structure of the cookie looked liked before I sewed everything on.

Jim Henson would slap me in the face at this point. I love you - eek!

Moving on. When I was back in CT i stopped into A.C. Moore’s craft store and bought 6 sets of doll joints. Doll joints allowed me to attached the eyes to the puppet and still let them rotate. This is completely unnecessary for this project, but I thought it would be a cool feature to add for future ventures because the eyes of the puppets can be more easily removed and can also be rotated to express different emotions. See below:

Happy puppet-

Angry puppet -

Crazy Puppet -

I also watched some great tutorials online about creating movable eye-lids on a puppet. This is one of my goals for a non-SketchFest puppet.

The day before SketchFest I put the chocolate chips on this bad-boy and here is the final result:

Isn’t he gorgeous?

Hershey Bar was probably the least exciting puppet of the 6 during the creation process. Coming off the high of creating two beautiful and vibrant puppets, a dark square puppet wasn’t exactly the best next choice. No challenge. Unfortunately, I was still fighting an internal debate over which puppets I wanted to make afterwards, so it was the only option I was sure of. If it didn’t have the aluminum foil to give it flair I probably would have scrapped the whole idea.

Here is the dude before I added the chocolate portion that sticks out of it.

Two days before SketchFest I made the actual chocolate portion of it by painting some foam board that I glued together. Originally I wanted the foil on the top portion to flair out as if it was in the process of being eaten, but it looked too sloppy and would have been destroyed when we tried to transport it. Ended up not looking too bad though. Kinda cute if you give him a chance.

Many thanks to Stasia for letting me use her paint. Also thanks to the Hershey company for creating the universal image for a chocolate bar.

Meow Meow. Willy Wonka. Meow Meow.

While JT and Kogler finished up the fries to go in fry-box, I started working on the pizza slice puppet. Once again, I love them for their hard work.

I made the pizza frame out of cardboard boxes that I stole from work (thanks, Federal Mogul!). It was pretty simple, just a big, fat triangle. Here is the fabric, halfway through the sewing process when I decided to call it a night.

Once again, I got the fabric from Joanne’s, they had some 50% off deals going on so I didn’t hold back. I’m slowly getting better at stitching and it felt cool to show JT and Kogler the best way to do it.

One goal of mine for the SketchFest puppets was to make them all uniform. I wanted people to see the puppets and know that they were part of a big set and not 6 random puppets we happened to have. The most important part of that was to make the eyes and mouths look the same on all of the puppets. I used a standard size/shape for the mouths on all of the puppets and the same type of eyes. Worked out pretty well. Here is my roommate, Stasia, showing off the pizza puppet before it was given crust and pepperoni.

It looks like a block of cheese, I’m not upset about that. Stasia is going to kill me for posting this picture. I started working on the Hershey Bar puppet and had Stasia finish this guy up by creating the crust and the pepperoni. She did an amazing job, here is what it ended up looking like.

The French Fries were the first of the 6 puppets I made for the Cosmic Lunch scene of SketchFest. After making Purple Box, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with Fries, or “Mac” as I like to call him. I went to Joanne Fabric and picked up yellow and red felt, some styrofoam balls for the eyes, and a few other supplies.

The frame of fry-box is foam-board like you would use on a science fair project. I drew out the general shape and started taping it together like so:

I traced onto the fabric and hand-stitched it together. The mouth was still a bit of trouble but I found that if I stitched on extra red fabric that went inside the mouth it looked pretty cool and covered up most of the jaw action going on. The hand portion of the puppet was an old dress sock that I hot-glued to the frame. I don’t recommend that anyone put hot glue on a sock while their hand is in it, but I did it anyways.

The fries for the box were just cardboard rectangles, and they were cut to form a pyramid shape. Many thanks to Jim Tomola and Jim Kogler for helping to stitch the yellow felt for the fries while I started working on the next puppet. Finished product looks something like this:

His catchphrase: Surfries!

This is purple box.

Purple Box (named by Jim Tomola) is a purple box. This was the mockup I made for the french fry box. I wanted to test out a puppet design method for puppets that had flat front faces with mouths that don’t take up the entirety of the face.

Take a look around online, you’ll have a real hard time finding puppets that don’t have a jawline that extends across the entire line of latitude on their face. Its just a difficult thing to do / make look good. I honestly couldn’t find any puppets like that anywhere so I tested it out myself. Purple box itself is pretty ugly because its just a prototype but the future versions turned out pretty well.

He was made out of triscuit boxes (i love triscuits), duct tape, and hot glue. The purple felt was left-over from my bat-wolf puppet and the googly-eyes came from my extensive collection.

As seen above, Purple Box is a horrible evil killing machine. He has a cute voice that he uses to hide his plans to kill me and my friends. Purple box pooped in my bed. Purple box is currently nailed to Jim Kogler’s wall, plotting his next attack.

After Chris told me about the Cosmic Lunch sketch idea, I was pretty jazzed about the whole puppet aspect, could barely sleep. I made some mock-ups of what I wanted the puppets to look like. Here’s what I came up with.

The facial expression was modeled off of a tennis ball muppet I found in the Muppet Wiki and made my own. Chris loved them.