Making the Profile Police Chief Lip-Synch Shadow Puppet

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  Got design for hat just as I wanted it but was not happy with the face as I thought it was too similar to my design for the President. The drawing on the left is more the kind of face that I wanted.

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  In this picture I have altered the face that goes with the hat and added in the body.

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  I copied and blew up the size with my copier/scanner again and found that it was just right in relation to the size of the other puppets I’d made. This was glued to black card and cut out through both layer.

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  The finished head with separate lower jaw.

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  This is the body cut out and laminated.

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  The laminated head (without the lower jaw)

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  All of the laminated parts (not fully cut out yet).

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  A size comparison with “our hero” profile puppet

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  The fully assembled puppet with elasticated lower jaw as with the other characters.

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  On the OHP flatbed

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  Shadow on the screen

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The Police-chief design is meant to look futuristic but also firmly routed in present day military and police uniforms and body armour. I also wanted the design to obviously be a version of the British Police uniform because the story is set in a future version of the U.K. That said I also took some inspiration from the uniforms of other countries and a bit of sci-fi. You can draw your own conclusions on what those inspirations were but the very outsized hat was a deliberate choice.

The character has what you might call “small man” syndrome and feels he has to compensate with big status symbols (Hat and body armour). The other regular police officers/underlings will not have hats like this.

The uniform and hat also have the emblem of the City on them (a stylised phoenix) which you will see in lots of places in the course of the story.

I chose the same nodding mechanism design as I had used for “our hero” (the head pivoting on the neck rather than the neck pivoting on the body as I chose for the Prime Minister) as with the high collar on the uniform, this character would not have a lot of free movement of his neck.

This character has very close cropped hair or stubble and I was not quite sure how to achieve this at first but I am happy with the finished effect. The fact that the hat covers most of his head meant I did not have to do too much stubble cutting out!

We have now got a producer on board and we are looking for funding for the project. We are firstly aiming to secure some R&D money to produce the first 10 minute episode. This means, sadly that I will have to pause the making side of things for a while (as anything we do before securing the funding we will not get paid for). I will however be able to blog about other things and keep you up to date and progress (if any) with “The Secret Keeper” show.

In the meantime, if you would like to make a donation towards the project please use the donations box below: