Wooly Mammoth cutaway puppet



This picture was taken at a display at the Imagine Nation Expo, where the commercials were also shown. Apparently the foam latex in the puppet was disintegrating, so someone decided to cut it apart as a nice cutaway model showing the innards of a stopmotion puppet. It's really a thing of beauty, especially if you share the fascination with intricate metal armatures that afflicts us stopmotionists. Looking at the picture, you can see that the armature was coated with some kind of grey paint to isolate it, possibly a high-temp engine paint due to the heat generated in the foam curing oven. As I understand it, the paint protects the brass parts from coming into contact directly with the foam latex, which will react badly and devlop an ugly discoloration otherwise. You can also see where they padded the armature with some cut foam before placing it into the mold for foam injection. This saves on expensive foam latex and also helps to further isolate the armature from the chemicals in the latex. The skull and main bulk of the body, which don't need to be flexible, seem to be made from some hard substance like sculpy, and embedded in the center of the body is a ball with a hole drilled in it. Mark suggested this might be threaded to connect to a support arm, which I think must be the case, since there was a support rod used in the Giant Ground Sloth commercial in the Movie Magic segment. I asked mark about the wires or threads wrapped around parts of it, and he said they seem to have been put there after it was cut open, probably to help hold things together.