The sounds made by the servos in the capstan bench and the puppeting exercise during class last Thursday reminded me of the Jack Skellington’s ghost dog from Nightmare before Christmas, Zero. I decided to make a version of him but with a less complex face and simple movements. I tried to put a nose inside his face but the string slips after a while when tying silk (I had to retie it 4-5 times) so I ended up just using a sack head look. For a reference, I included a song from the movie. Zero’s featured the longest at the part starting 3:17.

I hand-puppet tested a gliding motion as well as one hovering in place. Once I got started on the capstan bench and spent some time setting things up and adjusting them, I realized I had to simplify the motions of the cloth moving towards the camera because of the amount of space taken up by the setup, me, and my camera on a tripod. Hence, I decided to eliminate the first motion. One huge annoyance I didn’t account for was how often things would tangle because of string falling off the capstans and the fact that the close locations of the capstans plus only having two poles to hang things off of meant many strings crossed paths. A lot of time was stuck fixing things if a counterbalance reached it’s limit or a string gave out/tangled. There was also a struggle getting the either jolt-y or too slow motions of the servos to appear more natural and fluid, similar to the effect of wind when fighting the reality of no wind and gravity. I have mixed feelings about the final result because the two hour time limit on the bench and my inexperience with the setup limited my exploration but I think I was also approaching the point where the setup was starting to fall apart and function less well the longer I fidgeted with it.

I uploaded the final video on vimeo (but it’s too big to directly upload and the site won’t let me embed the video): https://vimeo.com/312605474