Project #1808
Spitting Image
The Project
What fun! Avalon Productions invited us to tender a design for eye mechanisms for two series of Spitting Image on Britbox and ITV. We have now also made a different design for the recent stage production.
Every puppet is a unique hand crafted creation and so everyone is different, but each one needs an eye mechanism to allow the puppeteer to control the eye movement and make the eyes blink.
We were told that our solution needed to be lightweight, strong and durable - oh, and every one is different. Right up our street!
We started this project during the first Covid lockdown, so everything was done remotely. We submitted a video proposal , generated within our CAD software to show the mechanism working, and went on to make a prototype to prove the design.
The blinking is achieved remotely with bellows air pressure, and the eye movement is achieved remotely with a bowden cable we developed to give the flexibility needed to feed it through the puppet but tough enough to survive the rigours of the film studio.
Finished Characters
It would be great to show you our mechanism, but as you can imagine we put a lot of work into it and we just don’t want to share our design publically. However the stage play is currently on in the West End and everytime an eye moves or blinks, there is a Cabinium Product on show. The TV series are available on Britbox, and Avalon have been kind enough to credit our work at the end of the shows and in the stage production programme.