BJ GUYER: So now we've got to this point
where I'm happy with the shape.
I like the way it looks.
I've got my funky dimples and my unevenness in there.
We want to move on to
how to core this out.
Now the one thing you need to remember,
about working with a solid foam puppet
is that you still have to get your hand up inside there.
And, and make this a functional puppet.
Natural tendency,
that most people have
is to cut a hole straight in the bottom.
You know, they're putting their hand like this.
You're never puppeteering in this position,
or not,
it's not a good position to puppeteer in.
Remember what we talked about in the first class too,
was your natural, the natural angle of your arm,
basically, is that -
when you're puppeteering you want to follow that.
So you don't want
to try to put the hole directly under your puppet
and have to puppeteer it like this.
This is going to be very uncomfortable
and very awkward.
So you want to look -
hold your puppet up to a mirror
or just hold it up and eyeball it
and see where your hand
lines up
with the mouth of the puppet.
And where the natural access point
for that character is.
In this case,
it's back here.
I need to keep one of those - sorry.
Alright, so we want to be,
we want that natural, that angle,
so we want to look right where that wrist is
and that's our point,
on the back of the puppet.
We want to mark that as our hole,
where our hole's gonna be.
Now I usually use a tape roll,
just a regular masking tape or standard tape roll.
Because that center hole
is a pretty good size
to mark for where you want the entrance,
the size of the entrance hole.
Put it up against the puppet,
set the puppet on there.
Look at it. Make sure it looks pretty even.
And then you want to check that again.
You want to kind of
mark that with a marker.
And you want to use the smallest hole you possibly can
to put your hand in.
You don't want to make too large of a hole
on the bottom of the puppet.
Okay, so for this guy,
his mouth lines up there,
so my wrist should be right about there.
So that's about right
where I want it.
Check these distances
from the corner of the mouth -
I use my hand a lot because it just fits -
so from the bottom of the mouth here.
And it's about four fingers across.
That's a good distance.
Now I want to check the same thing on this one.
I can actually just rotate it.
Same thing and I'm about four fingers.
So I'm equidistant from both sides.
The front's probably going to be a little farther away,
because I want to sit back a little.
So I'm going to grab a new Personna,
cause I want a straight one for this first cut.
Alright, so this first cut, we're going to do,
we're going to go straight in.
You don't want to angle too much
because you don't want to cut in
to the outer edges of your foam.
You don't want to punch through it.
But at the same time,
you don't want to make a little cone,
because you're just going to keep hacking all of it away anyway.
So, let's see, we're over there.
So I'm gonna come in here
and I'm gonna just go straight in.
And I want to start
by cutting in as deep as I possibly can.
So I'm gonna kind of
force this Personna in
almost all the way.
I mean, it's about 3/4 of the way in.
And then I want to -
same thing I did before -
I'm kinda holding the blade and rotating
the head around.
Oops and then I slipped and cut it.
Be careful of that.
Try not to do that, that I just did.
We'll fix that later.
Now we see where we're at.
We've got a nice deep cut in there.
So we want to get in there with the Personna blade again.
And we want to try to cut about
a quarter of the way deeper.
You don't want to go too deep again,
but we want to get in deep enough
that we're not just sitting here hacking away forever
to clean the inside of this out.
Now at this point, we can,
if you have enough thickness on top,
you can get in here with your hands
and you can use your fingers
and you can actually pick this away
and pull this plug out.
If you don't have a lot of thickness in the top,
don't try that,
because you do that
and you're going to pull right through the top of your puppet.
What I'll try to do then,
is I'll actually try to turn it inside-out.
And you can actually kind of squeeze this whole puppet
and then get in there with your Personna blade
and you want to trim around the edge
as much as you can.
And then you get a nice little plug out of it.
Now save this too.
This'll be great for a nose
or whatever you want to make later on.
What I'll generally do at this point, then,
I'm gonna split the mouth open the rest of the way.
So I'm gonna pull this open,
get in there with my Personna blade
and I'm gonna get a nice, deep cut
all the way across
and get this mouth opened up.
And I want to cut about halfway back
into the puppet.
So this is about where we're at now.
Now, what I want to do,
is I'm going to go ahead
and make a little mouth plate for this.
So, I'm gonna draw my lines where I want my lip to end
and I'm gonna start carving from inside the mouth back,
rather than trying to work all the way from the inside here.
Now generally I want to come in
about 3/4 of an inch to and inch
inside the mouth, when you mark it.
I'm gonna do that both on the top and the bottom.
So now we've got this mark,
inside here.
And we're gonna get in here with the Personna blade.
One thing I want to do is,
I want to give myself something to glue the mouth plate to.
If I got in here with a Personna
and just cut all this out,
I'd have a perfectly flat wall
and I'd have to glue against it.
If you're gluing in a mouth plate,
either rubber, or wood
or whatever you're using,
actually I have a mouth plate right here.
You can see the thickness,
it's very limited. It's very thin.
That's not a lot of surface area.
So what's going to happen is
if you glue that in, right up against there,
eventually that's just gonna tear off.
So what I'll do inside of these guys is
I'll give myself a little ledge.
So the first cut I'm gonna make,
I'm only gonna cut down about a 1/4 of an inch or less,
into the foam.
And then when I come around again,
you see I pulled, I can pull the lip back.
I've got that little bit of a ledge.
So I'm gonna come across the back side now
and I'm gonna cut in at an angle from the back
and try to pull that piece out.
And basically what I'm doing is
I'm giving myself a little shelf,
all the way around, just inside the lip line
so that when I glue my mouth plate down,
I'm not just gluing down
to the edge,
I'm gluing down to that
1/4 inch along the bottom as well.
So I get a nice secure bond inside that mouth.
So now if you look inside here,
what you see is, you've got
this angled, this little channel cut.
Now I'll take my blades
and I'm gonna go in
about a 1/4 inch from that line
and then I'm gonna start to cut in
and remove out,
remove the foam from inside the head,
from the mouth.
So you pull this back,
there you can see that,
let's see if I can show this to you.
So I pull this lip back,
you can see the ledge here.
And then this is all the extra foam that we're going to be cutting away.
So you can start from the front
and you just need to be pretty careful
in cutting crescents across.
The other thing you can do too,
is you can go from this bottom hole inside,
and you want to carve across the back, basically.
A nice little deep channel,
so that once you reach that point,
you're not digging any farther inside.
And then just pull that piece out.
So we're getting there.
You see it's really snug still.
So we've still got some work to do
in coring this out.
Now's a great time to take that,
that bent blade.
And this is just
taking your time,
getting in here now
and just starting to clean this out
so that your hand fits inside really well.
There we go.
That's pretty good.
And where my thumb is,
I have a really long thumb,
I'm gonna open that up a little bit as well
to get in there,
but that pretty much gives me
all the movement I need.
It gives me a good entry point,
in the back of the puppet,
back there.