I did an animation test of the puppet head with animatable eyebrows to see how it looks and moves on screen:

I didn't like it at all, it makes him look too comical. Moveable eyebrow idea scrapped!

I had made a few different prototypes of possible puppet heads for the librarian puppet. I particularly like two of these, the first is made of balsa wood, the second is a sculpey base which is then covered in a very fine foam layer with latex. I wanted to test how these would look under camera with lighting as I was unsure whether the features and detail and the heads would show up well enough on screen.

Here's how they looked:

I'm having a bit of a struggle at what one I liked more. I particularly liked working with the balsa wood, which is extremly light so isn't detrimental to the movement of the puppet and gives nice angular detail to the face; however I like the texture of the foam and book pages, but the head wa extremely heavy on the puppets long neck.

I think what I need to do now is try adding writing or book pages onto the balsa wood head and see what this looks like.

I had built two armatures, both with different sized wire to see which I would prefer animating with; however straight away I realised I didn't even want to try with the smaller sized wire as the puppet was getting a lot of bounce back when even just trying to position him on screen. These tests are all therefore with the one armature.

I thought I would try animating the scene where he's at the bookcase throwing books to the floor and also the scene where he walks across the screen dragging the book along behind him. My animating skills are currently VERY rusty so I am now getting back into the swing of things.

I almost cried when I first watched this back. It became obvious to me that I was trying to add in lots of unnecessary movements which were complicating the point of the movements he was actually trying to make. Also the speed of the book falling was way too slow.

I felt like the animation worked a lot better with simpler movements, I also tried leaving more frames in between movements so as not to feel rushed.

This test was the most controlled so far. The one problem I did find was that not having a physical bookshelf to reach out to and pluck a book from meant that I was unsure where his hand should exactly be at that point to the action seems slightly confused. I will do another test with props in the the near future.

I have never animated a puppet with tie downs before, only pins so this was a completely new experience. I felt like he was shuffling more than walking but in a way this adds to his characteristic of being an old, miserable man. I'm going to try this again but swap the hands over so that the hand holding the book is on the side of the camera, I think the swinging arm might not be so in the way if it were further from the camera.