Caltech's Greatest Creation: The Making of Audrey II (Part 2: Pod 2 and the Cuttings)

No making-of pictures this post! Both Pod 2 and the Cuttings are essentially simple derivatives of Pod 1, with just a few minor modifications.

Pod 2

Functions:

• Open and close.  Can’t snap at people if you can’t open and close
• Range of motion.  It’ll look a lot more lifelike if it can actually turn its “head” around. 
• Conceal Seymour’s arm.  It shouldn’t look like your Seymour’s puppeting the plant and holding it up using a fake arm.

Well, knowing what we know from Pod 1, this one is pretty easy. It follows mostly the same process--papier-mache, wiring for handles, stem, pot, leaves.

We decided to give our Audrey 2 a kind of beak, and that first started to show with Pod 2.  All we needed was some masking tape, which we added onto the end of the upper jaw and cut to look like a beak. A lot simpler than I expected.  

Instead of the bottom, we’ll be putting a hole in the side of the pot. This makes the geometry of the whole thing a little easier--Seymour puts his arm through the side of the pot and up the stem into Pod 2’s pod.

Now obviously we don’t want people to see Seymour’s arm stickin into the pot. So we’re going to throw a jacket on him. He’ll slip one arm into the jacket, and we’ll jam a glove on the other jacket arm and stick it onto the pot. Now we have a fake arm pretending to hold the pot up, while Seymour’s real arm actually holds it up from the inside. We made sure to stuff the arm and put in some dowel rods to keep the arm straight.

It will make your life a lot simpler if you cut a hole in the jacket for Seymour’s real arm to stick through into the pot.  We wanted to keep the jacket afterward, so we had to add some straps to the jacket to keep it on Seymour’s shoulders.

Cuttings

• The only function the cuttings must fulfill is that they can be put into their pots on stage.  They just have to be kept out of sight until then.

Alright, these should be a snap, just make a littler version of pod 1, and make sure your girls hide them in their pockets or something when they come on stage.  Then they palm them into their pots and show the audience how cute the little guys are.

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