Lets make Grandma!

DESIGN

DEVELOP: 
The 1st attempt of Little Old Grandma...

I decided to start my first trial of Grandma; using a paper cup as the canvas. I used pipe cleaners as glasses, grey wool, and soft sponge for hands.This puppet was fairly easy to develop, although I found it difficult to mould the glasses and stick them onto the cup and fluffy wool (hair). Some photos below of me creating this puppet:

After trialling the puppet, I identified the following problems:
After making this puppet, I realised that it does not fulfill the criteria of 'the best way to tell Little Red Riding Hood'. This is because I felt that;

1. Its too small for the audience to see
2. The manual handling of the puppet wouldn't work very well in a performance, as my hand hardly fits into the cup, and its hands cant be moved or the puppet wouldn't look like she's talking- not animated enough.
3. Even though it is clear that is a Grandma character, I would like to have other distinguishing elements to make her more believable and look more professional, such as a dress, buttons and other features.

Develop a solution
Attempt 2
I decided to keep with the idea of using a cup, but developed a brand new puppet, this time using it as the body and make a separate head on top of this. I believed this would make the puppet bigger so that the audience can see it and much easier to use; which it was. Using the cup as the body also enabled me to have a canvas to show more Grandma qualities, such as ribbons and buttons. I still decided to use glasses, and they worked alot better, as I did not try to glue them to wool, but to the sock. I used wool hair this time because the fluffy wool on the previous puppet did not stick well to the cup.

I put a hole in the top of the cup to thread the head through and when you put your hand up the puppet, you can hold the end of the head sock which can make her nod and make movements to an extent.

Below are some photos of the Grandma character developed:

 

Making changes...

Again, I wasn't completely happy with my Grandma character. There were a few changes I wanted to make, which I believed would improve the puppets look and functions. These were; 

- To somehow make the head not slip through the hole but keep it movable to show animation and     personality. 

- The other was to make her look a bit more Grandma- ish! 

- I like the concept of the cup as the main structure or body that I could work with, and I wanted to use more material so it could be imagined by the audience that she was in bed.

Attempt #3

Evaluation

I believe that this final puppet of Grandma is perfect for what I wanted it to do! I still used the cup as the body, which was good because my hand did fit up there without a problem. The large piece of floral fabric was much more Grandma looking, as well as hid the start of my arm and make her look like she was nice and comfy in bed! The paddle pop stick and cardboard head was much easier to move and her googly eyes made her look much more animated! Her hair was easy to stick on and I used red felt for cute little lips. I found other Grandma decorations from the op shop, such as a pearl necklace and buttons. I decided not to put glasses on the final product, as it would crowd her face and wouldn't be able to see her eyes as clearly. 

 

When performing... 

When the puppet is performing I imagine her to have props all around her, many old items , a grand father clock and perhaps have Oprah or Dr. Phil on TV in the background... this comes from my personal experiences of my own Grandmother. Also having her dialogue spoken traditionally with a weak voice would be most effective, as the other characters are mostly modern.