Tin Woodman Puppet
Contributed by Mattzilla Duron
When I had first starting some drawings for the Tin Man back in 2012 I wanted him to look like a mix of the John R Niel drawings and Wenslow artwork. Return to Oz had a really excellent representation of the tin man, I didn’t want to duplicate it but did use elements from it for our movie. There were a few sculptures that I had done that I could tell I was getting too far away from my idea by attempting to make a "Tin Man" version of a man. It was too organic and made me realize that he was looking more like a skeleton than the description in the books.
After I finished sculpting him I molded him and made resin castings. The resin castings where then modified and shaped more for exactly what I wanted. It's sometimes easier to clean up a hard piece and re sculpt on it than to make a machined "Metal" out of clay. I didn’t want him too perfect or too complex because then it takes away from the charm and simplicity of the original Illustrations. I wanted to imply that the Tinsmith has a unique style of construction. When the puppet started to come to life I was really happy with the changes that were made.
I was pleased with just about every thing on prototype puppet we made for Kickstarter except the feet. I realized later that my mind was in the right place when i designed the feet but they didn’t match the rest of the design, they looked like a segmented beetle carapace; much too organic for the Tinsmith to make his feet like that. He would make simple, yet somewhat elegant "shoes with spats" for the woodsman to have feet that looked both classy and durable.
For a little while I had a version of the Tin Man’s head where he had no ears, just holes for where ears would be. I realized he lost a bit of charm by losing his ears, and it started to look like a metallic representation of a skull. Too real! So I dialed it back, added his ears again. It would make sense because the Tinsmith was helping out Nick Chopper by keeping him as close to his original form as possible!
The main reason i decided to keep the hands silicone is because it's the easiest way to make the hands for what we need in our short. I had started designing a pair of hands that, after a while, looked wildly complicated and strayed too far from the simple charm of the artwork. The complexity is there but it's not illustrated in such detail that you get lost in distraction, but more of a design that implies exactly that they're hands. When I first started doing junk castings for the hands I thought using silver powder in the silicone would give us a really neat looking metallic look. It looked pretty cool however where the seamline was it wasn't metallic. just a dull grey. So i scrapped that idea and went with grey silicone that we paint up with powders to make it look like it's metal.
When I was designing the head I had originally sculpted it as you would see it, I didnt fabricate the jaw to be removable because that sort of thing is best done after molds and castings are finished (at least for me). With the resin head casting I dremelled away the jaw. Then i smoothed out the area where the jaw would be, cast up a new head, and dremelled away the head, leaving only the jaw. I drilled some holes and viola! The jaw is attached to the puppet head and can now open and close for animation.
The eyes were another tricky part because I knew how i wanted them to look but wasn’t sure about how to execute it but then i remembered the magic of magnets. Since the Tin Man has black dots for his eyes within the square "eye" socket of his head, I made a steel plate that can be inset into the "eye socket" and then I took the teeniest of magnets and painted them with a black shiny enameled paint. Now it’s easy to animate him looking around just by sliding the magnets across his eyes.
For the eyebrows I used a trick i learned on a TV show that i worked on: The eyebrows are sculpted in a urethane putty known as propoxy and shaved down to look just right. We animate them by using vaseline to keep them "glued" to the tinmans head. It works great except the eyebrows are small and we are always dropping them, breaking them, and losing them. So the tinman has a whole bunch of eyebrows we keep for emergencies.
The biggest differences i wanted between the prototype puppet and the final puppet was mainly to swap out the visible joints with real joints. I love using wire armatures because it's inexpensive and you get a LOT of movement, but because of our successful Kickstarter I decided we could have nice things like ball and socket joints. SO for the elbows knees and ankles, his armature is simple aluminum armature wrapped in nylon. But now his neck, shoulders, and hips are ball and socket joints. It not only looks cooler but also moves wonderfully, and since they are exposed the view can see the armature. One of the trickiest aspects of ball and socket armature is that the tension loosens up after a bit so hopefully halfway through a shot you don't have to re-tension your puppet joints because then you loose a pose.
