Giant Puppet Movement Test 

I designed this puppet on paper, and co-built it last summer (2012) in Montreal with a team of skilled artists and technicians under the supervision of Atelier Volumique and myself.
Here you see the Naga (snake man) without his 12 feet long tail or costume. He is 10 feet tall when a 6 foot tall person operates it. Daniel Auclair built the articulated aluminum skeleton over a special rigid backpack designed for hunting. We built the rib cage out of a lightweight Plastazote foam, assembled onto the frame with bolts, washers and lock nuts.
The head and arms were cast from a silicone mold, using a plastic (Smooth-Cast) and backed on the inside it with some lightweight epoxy putty. The arm rods were ski poles, and were removable thanks to long threaded rods installed inside the hollow rods. It was connected to a swivel inside the forearms.
Despite using the best of primers, I found it very difficult to make the acrylic paint grab onto the sculpture. Scratches were frequent.
When I build other giant puppets, I'll opt for a lighter set of materials. The three puppets we built this way were strong, and easy to operate, but I found them a tad too heavy for my tastes. Next time, I'd like to use the same kind of backpack, but the frame would be bamboo, and the sculpted features would be paper mache, as it is lightweight, strong, and easy for the paint to fuse with it. And yes, the paper mache I create is plenty strong enough to be performed outdoors, as it gets 4 coats of waterproofing before painting it.
I wish I could show you the assembled end results in photos or film, but we were all working so hard we often forgot to film the puppets before letting them go. I have some in-progress photos of the finished heads on my Facebook page:
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