Inside The Corn Elf.

The innards of the Corn Elf

We have already seen the design and look of the Corn Elf, but how did he work?.
The problem was, he needed to be frantic in the first scene, hardly being able to spit out his words because of fear, but in the second scene he would interact with the live actor and other Small One Puppet. I decided long before I built him that the scene on the bridge where he interacted with live actors, he would have to be operated with blue rods and his mouth and blink would be Animatronics. After that scene was complete, I would wire up all of his key facial elements such as mouth, eyelids, neck, arms and replace his eyebrows with removable, moveable ones to convey more emotion.

A little back step here... the bridge shot was the second scene the Corn Elf was in, but I knew that once he was wired up with bendy wire for the first scene he would be unusable for the bridge shot second scene,so we simply did them in reverse.

Link to, the design and look of the Corn Elf

Where to start with the innards of the Corn Elf.

There was not to much movement required from the Corn Elf for the bridge shot, he only had to point and say a couple of lines, his mouth only had to open and close and a couple of blinks of the eyes... yes, there was the fact his arms had to hinge and move, just the same as our arms hinged and are able to move, that would be another problem to fathom out, but first the problem... how to make the innards of the head on a budget of almost zero, was our next obstacle!.

Saved by the Bear.

As we were scratching our heads and thinking where to start, my sister got a “Talking Bear”. It had a resonance box inside where you plugged in a microphone. When you spoke into the microphone, the mouth opened and closed, also the eyes moved up and down slightly in time to the words, crude but it worked.

My sisters Teddy went missing, where could it have gone!!

Striping the Teddy down to reveal the workings was easy, it did not have everything we needed, but it was a start.

Meccano is a very useful tool for building strong frames . The mouth was attached to the frame and a more permanent power source replaced the battery pack, we used a transformer we could plug in and never had to worry about gaining access to the head again, once covered.

The frame had a pivot on the bottom that would attach to the neck, enabling the head to pan and tilt.

Nick Daniel designed removable blue rods that could quickly clip on and off a small brace at the base of the head , these rods controlled the pan and tilt and were operated off camera by a puppeteer.

Above the mouth was a Fimo shaped pointed nose.. Fimo is a fantastic modelling medium, as like Milliput you can manipulate it into any shape you desire, only difference is that once you have the desired shape you bake it in the oven for it to harden,once cooled it keeps it’s shape forever. White Fimo was used for the construction of the teeth of the Corn Elf.

The gums and cleft were also made out of flesh coloured Fimo, while still soft the teeth were put on one by one into the gums, then after baking in the oven to harden, a very shiny glaze made also by Fimo was applied to the teeth and mouth to give a wet shiny effect.

The blink was achieved using a Shutter Release Cable, it’s a thin tube with a spring inside and when you press the syringe type pin, it pushes the pin out at the other end, it could be any length and still work, it’s strong enough to operate the blink mechanism.

Once you have the energy to push something in a certain direction you have got to work out a way for it to return back to its original position, springs are usually used as is elastic. For this problem I decided to use the resistance from bendy plastic, the plastic would give when the pin pushed up on it, but once released the plastic would automatically bend back to it’s original position and state.

So we now had the push and the pull, the frame to hold the mechanism was again built out of Meccano and once completed bolted onto the mouth and eye frame.

Both eyes would blink together, so only one mechanism was needed, it would be split, so the push point only needed to be in the middle. Two half Ping-Pong balls were fixed onto the end of the two blink rods using silicone, these would later push the foam latex eyelids down and cover half the eyes, only half was needed as foam latex flesh bottom lids would cover under the eye.