The PLAN! The CUNNING Plan!

Here’s a VERY rough sketch out of my notebook of the basic concept for my CJ puppet.

Since I’m building him primarily to use at SF cons, I like this design for 3 reasons:

1. It means I can walk around at con without constantly having my arms full of prawnling
   
   
2. He’s easier to spot if he’s up high
   (hey, I’m short – anything that gives me extra height is a good thing!)
   
   
3. Piggybacks are cute darn it! ;)
   
   

The controls for manipulating CJ will be hidden in the backs of his legs, in order to hide as much as possible the fact I am manipulating the puppet – at a quick glance it will just look like I’m holding onto him to keep him balanced, as you would with any kid you had on your shoulders.

In order to keep this relatively simple I decided to keep CJ’s movements fairly basic:

Movements He MUST Have

- Head back and forth

- Head up and down

- Eyeblinks
(Because if he has full movement of his head, and a blink for realism, I don’t know if full eye movement is 100% needed – I think I can still get a lot of expression without it)

Movements I’d Like Him To Have If At All Possible

- Full eye movement (up, down, and side to side, independent of his head’s movement)

- An antennae wiggle (no specific directional control but just enough to make them look real)

- A tentacle wiggle (again just a general twitch, nothing specific)

- Some sort of sound bite(s) of clicking or chirping (or even better a sound bite of dialogue from the movie) so that it sounds like he’s talking

Totally Bonus Movements Which Would Be Cool But Almost Certainly Not Going To Happen

- Undulating gills

- Palps flicking (those little folded paddle shaped tentacles in front of CJ’s mouth)

- Binary arm wiggle

I have no intention of manipulating his main arms or legs – goodness knows I’ve got enough work cut out for me just getting his head to move! CJ’s arms and legs will be strictly for balance.

So that’s The PLAN – now it’s just a case of implementing it!