Aborted Projects 1: Strings Attached...

A couple of years ago, I came up with a concept for a series of sketches which would have departed radically from the conventional Rubber Balls technique of life-size hand puppets filmed against greenscreen for compositing, in that I actually intended to make full-bodied marionettes filmed in complete miniature sets. Of course, this was wildly ambitious, and never got off the ground...

However, I did get as far as sculpting the masters for a marionette Boris Johnson head, along with a Michael Gove head (Gove was to play a stereotypical boffin, hence his exaggerated cranium). Both are small, around three inches from chin to crown. The Gove head is somewhat damaged in the photos, and was never actually finished, hence the rougher look than the Boris head, which was pretty much complete and ready for mouldmaking. He was sculpted bald, as I intended to add hair to the completed cast rubber heads (all the Boris family were to have been cast from the same mould) using fine hair from a large doll bought cheaply from a charity shop. This Boris was sculpted after the large hand puppet Boris and is, in my opinion, a superior sculpture to the large version.