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Emma Niemis
Puppet & Model Maker
Sweetie:
Puppet, Turnaround & Animations
Sweetie is a stop motion animation puppet, a character I designed and constructed for a project on Character Bestiary, creating a creature that lives amongst us but is never seen, until now.
Sweetie is one of my most treasured outcomes, he is 15” in height and 7” in width, making him also one of my largest puppets. Starting with two different baby dolls, I spliced their bodies together to create a mismatched appearance. To make Sweetie into a stop motion puppet, I created an armature piece by piece from varied strength posable wire and wooden blocks to support individual parts of the limbs. The left leg is made from woman’s tights and toy stuffing, with the edition of one of the dolls spare hand, little wooden jewellery letters and a small plastic eye. I replaced the actual eyes with different multicoloured glass ones and added eyelids kindly provided by Barry Leith, that were spare eyelids used on the Womble puppets back in the day. The posable jaw was cut from the head and bolted on either side of the temples to allow for movement of the mouth, revealing the acrylic teeth inside that are held together by Super Sculpey gums. Lastly, the clothing I used is a repurposed child’s one piece that I cut, stitched and styled on my new puppet to complete the look.
