At Black Cherry Puppet Theater, a few of us are working on a new marionette show for our original family shows repertoire. We're adapting it from the rod puppet show "Jack and the Beanstalk" created by our puppeteers Justin Durel and Jennifer Strunge for the 2010 Free Fall Festival. It was a huge success, and featured live banjo music by J Dilisio.
I've been charged with the task of creating a chicken that lays a golden egg.
Lucky for me, Michael had this schematic on the technical design of how the mechanism would work:
I guess the drawing was a little less technical than he remembered. I had a similar issue when I went to look for the original chicken from the rod puppet show.
After acquiring the cardboard puppet used in the first show and the crow from Hansel and Gretel (one of our other shows), I went to work on our little chicken.
I decided to copy some of the joints from the crow because I like it's neck movement. Here is the armature for the chicken with a hallow cavity for the egg to come out:
August 6, 2011: I finished forming the hallow body w/egg cavity from paper mache, so it covers the body armature photographed above. After some sanding, I attached those wings that I carved and voilà!
I began working on some little chicken claws:
And below is the control, specially designed so the chicken can bob it's head and flap it's wings erratically.
August 27th, 2011:
I finished working on the feet and painted the chicken after resolving some issues with the wings getting twisted. I still need to decide on the textile covering for the body and wings.
My next step will be figuring out how to make the egg and release mechanism for the chicken to lay the golden egg. After that will be stringing it. I'm almost done!
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