Caltech's Greatest Creation: The Making of Audrey II (Part 1: The Leaves and Pod 1)

Leaves

Leaves are on everything, so it’s important to come up with something simple and reproducible here.  Our leaves were made of two layers of green fabric, cut into a leaf shape, and sewed together.  We threaded some heavy multipurpose wiring into the leaves and left plenty of extra wire hanging out the end, so we could attach the leaves to the pods.  In total, we have 5 different sizes of leaves.  For each pod, we arranged 4 or so leaves around the pod base of each pod and a smattering of leaves around the pot of each pod.  We attached size 1 leaves to pod 1, size 2 to pod 2, size 3 to pod 3, and size 5 to pod 4; and we put size 2 leaves around pod 1’s pot, leaving pod 3’s pot bare and pod 4 didn’t even have a pot.

The gray line is a piece of multipurpose wire threaded in through the pointy end.

The dashed line is the channel we sewed in for the multipurpose wire.

Now we can attach the multipurpose wire to the plant and it'll have a leaf stickin out.

Pod 1

The baby Audrey 2. Before we can get into the building of this one, we have to have our list of functions it has to fulfill:

• Wilt.  Audrey 2 has to show it’s unhealthy by visibly getting weaker on stage, and the simplest way to do that is by having its leaves wilt
• Open and close its pod, like a mouth.  This is a way for Audrey 2 to show she’s interested when Seymour cuts himself, and opening the pod can be seen easily from even the back rows.  
• Grow.  We have to show that with a slightly more hearty diet, Audrey 2 has become much healthier.
• Portable.  Audrey 2 has to be brought on stage, set down, picked back up, and set back down again by Seymour.  
• Oh yeah, and as a consequence of the above, the puppeteer has to put the puppet on his hand while the puppet is in full view of the audience.

So how do we actually make this plant?  Well, the basic shell of the plant should look relatively hard, and the simplest way to make a hard shape like that is with papier-maché! That’s right! Arts and crafts time!  And how do we make it look pod shaped? Well, we’ll be using balloons for the mold.

I’m not an expert on papier-maché, but the basics are like this: you cut up strips of newspaper, dip them in a paste solution (ours was water and flour), then we lay them down on our mold and let it dry in that position.  So we slapped our pasty newspaper strips onto a balloon and hung it up to dry. Once dried, we laid down an extra layer or two, letting each one dry, until we were confident that the papier-mach would be able to support its own weight.

This is the same method we used to form the shell for pod 2, the blooms, and the cuttings, using balloons of various sizes.

Sarah covers our balloons in papier-maché

All the balloon-maché dries in some strange modern art installation

Once all our layers were dry, we cut the papier-maché balloon pod in half, so we have an upper jaw and a lower jaw.  The balloon is going to pop harmlessly when you first stab into the papier-maché, don’t worry about it, you can just pull out its pieces.  

Now might be a good time to paint your papier-maché.

We hot glued some of our multipurpose wiring into the interior of the of papier-maché pod to act as handles for the puppet.  A major advantage of this wiring is that it is firm enough to hold the papier-maché effectively, but it can be bent easily to fit the puppeteer’s hand.

The wiring glued to the pod as puppeting handles

Then we added the leaves, gluing the wiring into the pod.

The pot with the leaves, sitting next to the pod halves, and the entire workspace being a huge mess

For the sake of keeping the puppet lightweight and low-engineering, we did not put a hinge on pod 1 or 2.  Instead, we glued its stem (just a cylinder of green fabric) onto the pod. This left the pod’s jaws flexible.  This may have been a mistake on our part, as it was a bit difficult to get the jaws to align when opening and closing.  In retrospect, a light hinge may worked better.

Twoie's mouth is open and s/he wants blood.

Now, how do we get this plant to wilt on cue? Well, first, we need to to make our leaves resilient, so the spring back to life after each show. We did it by running some cable ties into them. 

So we put straight channel through the middle and fed a zip tie into that. Healthy resilient leaf now.

 Now to actually make them wilt, we use fishing line. Thread some fishing line from the middle of the leaf through the top of the pot.  Threading it through the middle instead of the top of the leaf makes the wilting look more realistic. Then we thread the fishing line to the back of the pot, into a thumb loop in the back.  The key thing to remember here is that this side of the plant has to always remain upstage so the audience can’t see the thumb loop.

Leaves Healthy

Leaves Wilted

Thumb Ring up

Thumb Ring down

Thumb Ring locked in place on a bolt

As for making Pod 1 grow to show it’s healthy? Just make some extra fabric for the stem, so the puppeteer just has to push their hand up further to make Twoie grow.

All grown and healthy. Not quite ready to eat people yet.

And finally, how do we make it so the puppeteer can put the puppet on in full view of the audience?  Well, we need to have a table for the puppeteer to hide behind. And unless you really hate your puppeteer and want him/her to be stuck under the table for 20 minutes, we need to have the table right at the entrance to the shop, to hide the puppeteer crawling on stage.  

My hiding spot behind the desk.

Nice lighting as the scene changes 

Next, we need that table to have a cutout where the puppeteer can stick their hand up.  You will probably also want to have a removable wedge on the table, so that there isn’t a big hole when the the plant isn't there. Seymour will have to place the plant directly over this hole, then the puppeteer can pull the wedge out.

Now the puppeteer can finally slide pod 1 on their hand.  But what’s this? The puppet fidgets all over the place when you try to put it on? The puppeteer is already minus one hand, how are we going to hold the puppet in place while they put it on?  The puppeteer will have to secure the pot in place first. We used velcro.  As soon as the table wedge was out, the velcro was put in place. Wait, what’s happening now? You’ve secured the pot, but the pod still wiggles all over when you try and put your hand in? Well, we glued some strings to the pod, so when the puppeteer is trying to slide their hand up, they can hold the strings down, holding the pod in place while they slide their hand up.  Oh man, something else? Yeah, you can’t have the velcro and strings hanging out while Seymour’s carrying the pod around, so we need another wedge to plug up the pot until Seymour puts it down.  So now the puppeteer has an intricate routine to perform when the pot is placed down: Pull out the table wedge, pull out the pot wedge, pull down the velcro and secure the pot, pull down the strings and secure the pod, slide your hand up into the pod, and wait for your cue.  If you ask politely, I’m sure Seymour will hold the pot steady for a little while you initiate the securing protocols.

The last thing you should do with Pod 1 (and with every pod) is add the mouth fabric. With the mouth fabric in place, you will no long be able to adjust any of the guts of the pod. It is your last chance to fix anything before the pod is finished.

Part 0: Introduction
Part 1: The Leaves and Pod 1
Part 2: Pod 2 and the Cuttings
Part 3: Pod 3
Part 4: Pod 4
Part 5: Blooms, Graspers, and All the Rest