Bobble Heads

The Internets and I haven’t been close lately. That’s mostly in part to crunching through weeks on a project that needed to get done “yesterday”. Imagine a cute little bobble head, then amplify it to stand eight feet tall. We’re building 4 of those. It’s fun in a hellish sort of way. I sometimes forget the million steps it takes to bring these suckers to life. Well, the photos help.

All of the following work is (c) Randy Carfagno Productions… y’dig?

More photos after the cut.
We start the whole thing off with preliminary sketches and onto clay/cooked/prepped versions of the characters (standing at 3 inches tall). Normally, these guys would be more caricatures than not, but the client didn’t want any funny business. I think we managed to give them some personality anyway. After all, they’re going to be too huge and imposing to look casual.

After what seemed like forever, I finally nail down some patterns and begin the “life size” portion of the project…

…which eventually leads to a [crappy] foam mock up, just to make sure it all works.

If everything’s a go with one of them, we can all proceed to make them out of superior and lasting foam. After they’re put together, there’s a lot more sculpting and modifying on all four heads. Aside from inner bracing/support and proportional adjustments, we gotta make sure the structure LOOKS perfect.

Many steps later (covering the heads with a few layers of all sorts of toxic stuff), we finally put the “skin” on them. They manage to look creepy and great throughout all of these steps.

Although I was in charge of the early building steps, the rest of the crew busted their ass on getting the bobble clothes right (which to me, is the hard stuff). I later had an immense amount of help in assembling the big heads and fine-tuning their characteristics. They also got painted and were given even more layers of skin tones while I worked on ears and eyes.

We made a lot of “head” jokes during this past month. Yes, they were very smart jokes… as in not at all.

These enormous bobble heads are not quite out the door yet, but the finish line is in sight. We still need to put hair on them and add some touches here and there, but I just had to post this batch of pictures, though, before heading back to work.

No pun intended.

xoxoFiffe