I had a lot of fun learning how to make a stop motion puppet from Rimi.  Her demonstration and calm presence throughout the process was great to experience, and her knowledge of the subject was very useful.  At one point I had trouble because I had drawn the arms too short in my original design, and when I asked her how to fix it her response was clear and she gave me confidence that I could fix the mistake without redoing the whole thing.  I think Rimi has a lot of great qualities as a teacher that stem from her patience.  Here are some images from the process:

Rimi suggested that I should add more wire to the arms.  The end loops in the picture above became the elbows.

Here is where I left the puppet.  I love the process of building up the hard points, and I want to continue and make the puppet into a character.  I used a braided rope from one of my daughter’s beading kits, and cotton balls to build up the form.  The process is really similar to modelling the figure from classes I took a long time ago.  I am imagining that you can discover the character through this process of putting the form onto the “bones” of the armature.  I want to experiment with animating this character once it is a little more fleshed out.  I can see that it wouldn’t be so easy because the armature is not easy to move in smooth increments as Rimi said.

This would be a great assignment for students,I think it could easily be a whole unit for a high school class in digital photography and film.  I love how interdisciplinary the process is, with elements of 3-d, photography and film.  This is definitely something I would like to try with High School students.