Tuesday 5th of May
Tuesday Leg day !
As a group we decided to focus on legs today. Lucky for us these creepy crawlies are rich in the leg department.
I decided to focus on the spider as I find their walk very interesting and their legs so thing yet very curious.
I started with paper, as I though, it might be the easiest material to start with and play around. I created little sticks by rolling pages of a magazine and then cutting into the little tube of paper. It creates an angle that than can bend in a certain direction. I then added a lot of tape to secure it, and tried to engineer a moving mechanism using thread that I sewed through the legs and the little cup. After studying the spider and its movement I understand that they move with quite a lot of symmetry, so I joined two legs with the thread allowing them to wobble.
I then added a little round head made out of paper crumpled up together, to give it the idea of a spider.
I've been mostly working out their base mechanism by looking at a lot of videos of how they walk and images of their legs. I am finding difficulty with thinking of the engineering of it all. I guess this is one of the obstacles of puppetry in quarantine, is not being able to work with others and learn. Of course we can use out webcams, but a blurry mechanism is not very useful. I am finding myself quite stuck sometimes with my creativity to come up with these technical drawings. It is something I need to work on these next few days as we have decided to extend our study of legs until tomorrow.
Here is a video, showing the string attached between the legs and the sort of movement I was able to get with that mechanism.
Here is a closeup of one of the legs using paper and tape.
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