>> Shannon Shea: From the Stan Winston School of Character Arts, I'm Shannon Shea,
and this is Garage Monsters. The storyboard shows a sequence of caves with
Geckonikis launching arrows and spears at our protagonists. What I find useful is to
think of these pieces, or elements, as layers, so let's separate them from the back to the front.
Okay? Now, let's get rid of the cave.
Once your creature is designed, it's good to determine a scale for him. I'm going to build mine
about 19 inches tall, and the reason I go with something that tall is because I don't
want my miniature sets and everything to get too big, so it's a nice manageable size.
It's good to take a piece of tracing paper and put it over your drawing to build a blueprint like this.
This will help you design the armature that's going to go inside of your puppet.
I'm going to screw one of the eye-hooks, but we're going to open the eye-hook with
a pair of needle-nose pliers, like this. You can take that and attach it to our shoulder
like so, and then close it up with a pair of pliers. You repeat that process with the
shoulders, upper arms and the upper legs. Again, if you're going to have a costumed
figure, I'm making a lizard creature right now, but if you're making a human figure
that you know that you're going to wardrobe later, you don't have to go to a really
refined ... these refined shapes. I know that I'm going to have a lot of lizard skin showing,
so I need to refine these shapes. I'm going to move from a big pair of scissors like this
to a smaller pair of scissors, like these little cuticle scissors that you can get from
a drug store. Alcohol on a paintbrush, and I'm just cleaning
up some of these inconsistencies in the Sculpey, and also using the power of the alcohol to
define some of these more delicate shapes. Obviously, the more time you spend refining
these shapes, the better they're going to be. Don't be afraid. After the alcohol evaporates,
you can always go back again and add more Sculpey.
I'm going to film this puppet many times with different weapons and doing different
things, and I'm going to have a whole tribe of lizard guys all for a fraction of the cost
of Avatar (laughs).