DI Reflection #8

This last week of DI, I have been to 3 meetings in which we put the finishing touches on the set. Until Friday, we didn't really have a script. I was supposed to create two heads for the puppet, carved out of styrofoam. By Wednesday I realized that this wasn't practical and that I wouldn't be able to carve a realistic head out of styrofoam, so I suggested we take a different approach. On Thursday we used plaster strips from the theatre room to make two molds of Brian Paul's face, which meant that I had to make them presentable by Saturday. That was my main project for the night before the competition, and although it was late I was really proud of how the faces turned out. They each had a hinging jaw operated by a nutcracker-esque mechanism, and looking at the challenge I realized that points were awarded for how realistic the puppet was. With this in mind, I gave each puppet a base coat of a basic flesh tone paint that I mixed, and then I did exaggerated shadows. I have highlighting to the nose and cheekbones and shadowed the eyes and jawline, which both close and up and from far away lends the puppet a very realistic look. Then, I differentiated between the puppets by giving the jock-puppet football-player stripes of black paint on his cheeks, and the nerd one a bit of acne. Altogether they looked very realistic, and the puppet flipped well. In the meantime, Heather had come up with a tentative script which we memorized the base of and decided to improvise the specifics.