B.E.C.K.Y the Robot Owl

Robot Owl from the Future

During the first semester of third year, inspired by Ireland's numerous affiliations with puppetry within children's TV shows, with the likes of The Den being a prime example, our course went through a module where we created a concept for two children's TV shows, similar to The Den. These shows each beheld a main presenter, who was the sole human, and a cast of puppets in a set environment which they are native to. I was involved in the making of Epoch's Time Travelling Hotel, a hotel that journeys through different eras in time, with its hotel manager being the main presenter to take the children through these worlds. This includes an era a billion or so years into the future, where humanity has been replaced by two robot races of owls and hedgehogs, who are now at war with each other. My puppet, B.E.C.K.Y (Brutal Enormous Crow-like Killing Yodeler) is a being from the robot owl race, and her main storyline is that she constantly fights with Russel, the robot hedgehog, much to the dismay of the hotel manager, and the other guests. 

The Process

Having being given the initial designs for the puppet, as I was not involved in the original group coming up with the concept of Epoch, I already had a main drawing and explanation given to me for the puppet, and now had to begin about the process of creation. All the modelmakers were given an initial demonstration on the making of a puppet, and ideas for construction were shared. 

I began with a base of foam, using a heat gun to bend it easily into a cylindrical shape to fit around my arm. This would become the body. I then shaped a square head with two more pieces of bent foam, for where my four fingers and thumb would control the puppet's mouth, and cut out two eye holes. I then covered these eye holes from the back with black card, as well as the mouth where my hand would be. I covered the foam with cardboard and then papier macheed both the head and the body. 

I then created the feet and wings using wires, foam and cardboard, in a similar process of covering each with the next as that of the head and body. I also added a tail, made from bent wire covered in places with foam. I did some more papier macheing around the separate parts of the puppet using multiple layers of paper before attaching the pieces together. 

For attaching the legs to the main body, I used two small pieces of bent wire going through each other and paper macheed to the body and the top of each leg. I repeated this process for the wings. For the tail, I just paper macheed the end of it onto the back of the main body. 

I also needed to vac-form two plastic semi spheres to create the outer eyes, fit to the eye holes I had cut out. As I needed one of the eyes to have a green light on it, I got a small string of fairy lights, poked a small hole through the black card at the back of the eye, and pushed the end light through while ensuring the others were covered. I made a pouch on the inside of the head using some black sock material to hold the battery for the light. I then spray painted one of the semi spheres green and hot glued both onto the inside of the eye holes. 

As the feet also needed claws, I then went about laser cutting eight rectangular shapes of plastic pointed at the end. I sanded these down to have amore refined shape and then hot glued them into holes I had cut out of each toe in the feet. I also laser cut two big triangular shapes that would then be the two eyebrows on the head. The wings also needed to be controlled, so I added a few more bent wire paper macheed onto the back of each wing as well as the bottom of the tail, and made two long poles easily clipped and removed from the hooks on the tail. 

The final steps were spray painting and brush painting to complete the puppet, as well as gluing a black sock onto the bottom hole of the head to go through the body, seen as a neck. I spray painted the whole thing silver, and then went around each edge with black paint to make it look more rusty. I also added lines and dots as well as lettering along the front of the body that were in the original design.

Process Gallery

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