Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1545257
PROPERTYMASTERSGUILD.ORG 29 like a tail, and one puppeteer controls the feet. I was brought in to sculpt puppets, armor, weapons, hand props, and set pieces. Hale's puppet fabrication style relied heavily on paper clay, so many of the pieces that I built to interact with the puppets were either simply attached with butyl or magnets. Unlike soft body puppets with fur and feathers, these puppets were hard and built with metal joints, so it made making props for them fairly straightforward. Having worked as a miniaturist for a couple years at that point, making tiny things wasn't a problem. Hale created an entire new world and already had many of the props and sets designed in concept drawings by the time we started. Because of that, this project didn't require as much design time as most of my other projects do and it became more of a fun game to see how closely the fabricators could get to the concept drawings. Most of the props were sculpted with paper clay as well and sealed so that their surfaces could be painted. For this film, those mostly ended up being dishware, trays, small inkwells and brushes, and laboratory equipment. The largest puppet I made for Yamasong was an oversized crab-like creature called a Klik-Klak. Because the main character Shojun was going to be riding it, I made the body out of cardboard and covered it in paper clay to give it strength. After a fellow sculptor, Hiroe Goto, sculpted the head of the creature, I had to figure out a way to connect it to the body internally while giving it a pivot point to puppeteer. I ended up building a structure to the head, cutting open the body I'd already built, attaching it, and then sealing it shut again. It was definitely a learning experience for working with multiple fabricators on one puppet: Always create a game plan for putting all the pieces together before you completely finish everything. I ended up working with Sam Koji Hale multiple times on various puppet projects over the years, but Yamasong: March of the Hollows was our first and most memorable experience together. Then in 2016, I was hired to build sets and props for a stop-motion puppetry project called Star Wars: Go Rogue around the time Rogue One was coming out. This was a really unique and challenging project in that there was no set scale size. Disney wanted to promote their entire toy line for Rogue One in one project so that meant everything from Lego minis to their 31" tall Stormtrooper toys. Stop-motion puppetry was a completely foreign world to me at the time. I remember building in one room while they filmed in another. I spent so much time watching the animators work meticulously on getting a prop STAR WARS: GO ROGUE STAN WINSTON SCHOOL OF CHARACTER ARTS