Hello. My name's Toby Olié and I'm a puppetry director and designer.
I'm also the creator and performer of
'What Does an Anteater Eat?' a short puppetry film
I made in lockdown based on this amazing book by Ross Collins.
Today I'm going to be showing you how you can make your own version of the
anteater puppet that I made for my short film
Who is right here.
You're going to need some simple materials from around your home
and some very very special artwork
made by Ross Collins especially for this video.
So why don't I show you what you'll need, and we can get started.
Okay so here is everything you're going to need to make your anteater puppet at home.
First things first you're going to need the template, very kindly illustrated by Ross Collins
The template is available to download. You can find the address in the description of the video.
Where you can download the template from as a pdf and you can print it off at home.
The next thing you're going to need is a piece of cardboard. This is an old cereal box.
I made my anteater out of an old easter egg box in lockdown.
Any cardboard that's thin enough for you to cut with scissors is best.
Speaking of which you're going to need some scissors as well.
You're also going to need some thin sticks these are kebab skewers but you could use
pencils, chopsticks, thin garden cane, anything like that
You're going to need a sharp pencil to puncture some holes in the pattern.
You're also going to need four of these split pins.
Now don't worry if you haven't got these at home, I'm going to show you
how you can sort of replicate them using either little bits of wire or string
to make the anteater's joints.
You're going to need some colouring pencils or perhaps paints or pens,
whatever you've got, whatever you want to use to colour in your your pattern.
You're going to need some tape, quite strong good tape.
I've got masking tape here just so you can see really clearly what i'm doing with it
because if it's clear tape it might be harder to see.
But yeah as long as it's good strong tape.
And you're gonna need some glue, glue to stick your paper template onto your cardboard.
So any kind of clear all-purpose glue or
pritt stick or I use this sort of craft glue
that's used for paper and dries quite quickly.
Anything like that that can stick paper to cardboard will be what you need.
So let's get started.
Okay so first thing you're going to do is stick your template down onto your
piece of cardboard. Now my template doesn't quite fit on the
piece of cardboard without overlapping some of these seams
um which are going to weaken the shapes of the anteater.
So I'm going to roughly, not around the dotted lines just yet, i'm just going to
roughly cut around my sections of anteater body.
So there you go, I roughly cut around those
just so then I can kind of tessellate them and make them fit
onto my bits of cardboard and without overlapping the seams.
That way the cardboard will keep its strength and the
anteater puppet will be nice and solid. Something like that.
Nearly, I might put that leg on there.
Okay so now all my bits of paper are glued down onto my cardboard
and I would always recommend, especially if you're using a very sort of runny
liquid glue like I've got, putting your glue onto the cardboard first
otherwise it might wrinkle and distort the paper and you'll end up with
lots of creases when you put it flat onto the cardboard.
So yeah I would say always apply it to the cardboard first and then press your
paper pieces down and smooth it from the inside out so
you're working out any air bubbles and creases. I've got a little one there
that's driving me slightly mad but i'll get over it. Yeah so you
work from the inwards out to even out the glue in the surface.
Now you've got to do is wait for it to dry. I might go and make a cup of tea.
My cup of tea is present and correct. So the glue is dry and the next two
stages, which are colouring in the anteater,
and puncturing the holes in the body parts, are easier to do
before you cut out all the separate pieces so I would say keep them on your
cardboard for now and for this next step.
So, colouring in your anteater. you can let your imagination go crazy.
It can be whatever colour you want it to be. You can go mega detailed, you can go
broad brush strokes. Im gonna use colouring pencils
but obviously you can use pens or or paints or whatever you like.
And yeah it can be any colour you want your anteater, let your imagination go crazy.
I'm gonna be a bit purist and emulate Ross's very brilliant anteater
from the original book, using some grey, some black, a bit of yellow
on his tail, so that my puppet looks identical to Ross's illustrations
which I used to make my puppet for the finished film.
So time for another time lapse while I colour this thing in.
So now all of your anteater sections are coloured in, the next step is to puncture
the holes in the pattern wherever you can see the black dots - there and there.
With your sharp pencil. Now the size of the hole that you're going
to puncture in the cardboard should be dictated by
what things you're going to use as your puppet's joints.
So if you're using these split pins you want to make sure the hole you puncture
is slightly wider than the pin itself. Or if you're
using string or wire you want to make sure that the hole
you're puncturing is sort of yeah twice the width of your string. You want the
joints to basically be quite free as you can see from my puppet here
they have a lot of swing to them so that when you're walking the anteater they
misbehave and do their own thing. You don't want the joints to be too stiff.
So, using your pencil puncture through
the cardboard be careful not to catch your fingers on the other side
but yeah pierce through and push all the way through
each of those holes on the cardboard making sure you leave enough room for
the split pin or the wire or the string that you're
going to use on your puppet. Last one.
There. So all the holes are punctured. There aren't holes
in these two legs or the head or the back end of the tail
because we're going to attach the joints to the other side of these body parts so
that you don't see pins and bits of string sticking out the
front side to keep the puppet really clean.
I'm not sure you can see that from the side but yeah the head is stuck
onto the kind of top end of my pin and so that from the front yeah you can't
see the joints there they're hidden and i'll explain more on
that shortly. So next step after this is to cut out
all your body parts.
So now all of your anteater's body parts are cut out, the next step
is to give him his joints. Joints that are going to go in his legs
in his head and in his tail. So to do this I'm going to use these
brass split pins but if you don't have these at home i'm going to show you
a technique you can use using wire or string that's very similar
to give the anteater his articulation. So first thing we're going to do is
cut or rip off a little bit of tape and with the sticky side up
push your pin down into the tape. I'm going to flip it over so you can see
so I'm pushing the pin up through the tape there
popped up that way yeah and then let's use the head as an example
turning the head over and imagining that that is a complete circle
I'm going to stick the head of that brass pin
into the middle of that circle.
And press down all around the outside. And then you'll have some excess tape
hanging over the edge. I would just trim that off
so you can't see it from the front.
There we go. And the next step. So we've got the head so then take the
neck push the kind of long legs of the split pin through that hole
and open them up that way to create your
puppet's joint. Now it might be that the ends of
the pins are a little bit pointy or sometimes if they're quite long pins
they can stick out and you can see them from the front.
So I bend them over again on themselves, just pushing the excess
of the pin back on itself like that. So you don't see it from the front
and it makes them slightly less pointy.
Now the legs are a bit different because the two legs are going to hang
off the same pin through one of these holes.
So repeat the same process that you just did
with the head so get a piece of tape push the pin
into the sticky side so it pops out the other side like that
and then again imagine there's a little circle
on the end of the cardboard and put that pin head
right right right right in the centre of that circle.
Press the tape around, secure it, trim off the excess.
Like so.
And then, so you're taking the leg that doesn't have the hole in,
put that through the body and then attach the other leg the other side
before you then open up all the pins on the other side.
And there you have both legs hanging off that same pin.
Now if you open up that pin too tightly
his legs don't move very well and they need to move quite freely
so that you can walk and use them to catch them on the floor when you're
animating your anteater, which i'll show you later.
So a way of making this less stiff is to either pinch the kind of pins
back towards each other slightly and also just to kind of work the cardboard
a little bit to kind of free it up as it can be
that the pin just gets a bit too tight. And there you go already that's a little
bit better moving a bit freer but yeah you want them to be
pretty free uh moving you don't want it to be too
stiff or rigid because of the cardboard or the pin so just keep sort of playing
with it until you can get a more kind of free
movement in the legs. And then you're gonna do the same
thing with the back legs and for the tail, you're gonna stick your pin
sticking up sort of on the anteater's bottom there and put your tail on.
So for those of you at home that don't have any of the brass split pins
I'm going to show you a technique that you can do to create the
puppet joints using just string ,or a really
thin wire would work as well, but I figured string is most likely
to be the thing that you have lying around at home.
So for each joint cut a piece of string that's sort of 10 to 15 centimetres long.
I'll demonstrate this on the head and neck of the anteater. So then rip yourself a bit of tape as
thin as possible really, while still keeping it straight.
So I've gone for a five millimetre little bit of tape.
And press that tape over the rope at the sort of roughly the halfway point
doesn't have to be too precise. There we go. And then similar to the
split pins you want to tape your string into the sort of centre
of the kind of end of that anteater's head, imagine there's a circle you want
to put the kind of tape bang in the middle there to create
your joint. Do that. Press it down firmly either side
so you've got that. Then gather up each end of the string
and post it through the correlating hole in the puppet. So I'm posting it
through his neck joint. There, that's easier than anticipated.
And then, with a split pin you would unfold the brass pins
that way but actually with the string you don't have to secure the string in
the same way you can just gather both kind of
excess strands together on the opposite side
and tape them down in place. Pulling it relatively tight, you don't want any kind
of excess string in the gap, you want the
other body parts to be quite taut next to the body.
And then once that's stuck down trim off the excess
and the joint behaves exactly the same way just using a piece of string instead.
Next step in making your own anteater puppet is control rods.
Now my anteater puppet had three control rods.
Two long ones, one on the head and one on the body for walking, and then a sneaky
little third one on his back front leg that means he
could pick things up, he could scratch his nose, he could do all sorts of things.
Now the reason that rod is shorter is so the weight of it didn't throw
off his swinging front leg. I still wanted to be able to move even when I
wasn't operating it. So yeah I've kept that rod short
to allow his legs to move. So for controller rods I've been using
kebab sticks, you could use chopsticks or pencils or things
that you maybe don't mind cutting up, or thin bits of garden cane.
I've cut a smaller length for his front arm rod,
and I've also trimmed off the pointy ends of the long
length ones. And so to attach your rods to your
puppet you're going to need two rectangles of tape.
Like so. And you're going to sandwich one end of your kebab stick
and tape like so, so your kebab stick is going to go halfway along that rectangle
and then you can do the same thing on the other side with
this bit of tape but then don't stick the kind of
exposed ends together keep those apart so you end up with sort of a
capital letter T of tape on the top of your rod.
And then press those two exposed sticky sides
onto your puppet. Now for the body rod I stuck my rod
equidistant between his leg joints so that when you twist
this rod it makes him walk. So I would advise you do the same thing.
so then stick that down like so making
sure it's all down nice and firm. And then do the same thing for your head
and your front arm rod.
So we've got our control rods on our puppet, but you may notice that this
anteater has quite a droopy tail, it looks quite sad. And you may notice
that the tail is knocking into the back legs of your
anteater, so we need to add a little kind of cardboard
blocker underneath the tail to keep it lifted, to keep him perky,
and to stop it from sort of fouling his back legs when he walks.
So to do that I've cut a tiny little strip
it's sort of just under a centimetre wide
of the same cardboard that I stuck my paper template onto, really thin
cereal box kind of cardboard. And I'm going to fold it sort of just to
one side of centre, like that, to make a little sort of pyramid.
Then halfway between centre and each side, I'm gonna fold it down one way
see that there you go down one way and up another way
and then stick those two ends onto each other,
so that I make a sort of little triangle, like that, a triangle with a kind of long
bit sticking off the side. And then I'm going to stick that little
triangle down underneath my anteater's tail, like so.
I'll show you. So that it blocks his tail from dropping down onto his front feet.
You can use the same glue that you stuck your paper template onto your
cardboard with. Or you can use tape you might just have
to take off the tail on the back leg to stick it down so that tape
doesn't foul the legs. But yeah attach your little triangle
blocker underneath your anteater's tail
to stop it from drooping.
So there we have it. You've made your own anteater puppet inspired by Ross Collins'
book 'What Does an Anteater Eat?'. The final step is to animate your anteater.
Let me show you how the anteater puppet walks.
The trick is to try and catch the different sets of feet at opposite times.
leaning into the back legs leading to
the front legs back legs front legs back legs front legs.
So if you can catch them at those different times then your anteater
can walk and you're just letting the legs swing and do their own thing.
Or your anteater can sit down, and you can swap onto that front hand rod
for scratching or picking things up and anteater is also very good at yoga.
He does a good downward dog stretch that way.
Enjoy animating and making your anteater puppets, and if you haven't already check out
'What Does an Anteater Eat?' on the Little Angel Theatre youtube channel
until the 1st of September.