I first wanted to make a ‘person’ with boning for his head and cords for his arms and legs so that he can nod and have his joints move, but I couldn’t think of a way to do the nodding motion because there were only two planes to work with and the back of the face should be on the same plane as the top of the face for other motions to work out. Also moving the joints are similar setups with same effects and just with different attachment points. Then I had the idea that If I can’t make the person nod, I can then ‘hide’ his face by reversing the movement.

I did ‘hiding’ in two different ways: with black ‘hair’ covering the face, and pull up the bottom of the boning so that the tube returns to its original shape. So the hidden face is first revealed and then get hidden.

Executing the revealing and hiding was fairly successful, working with movements of rigid parts is a lot easier to control than with soft fabric, and the movement of soft fabric is indeed just a ‘side effect’. Then I started playing around with what I already set up on the capstan. With the black fabric up and the tube high up, the black fabric looked like eyebrows, which I thought was very funny. And with the black fabric up and tube low, the black fabric looked like arm and the whole piece looked like it was trying to do pull-ups.