Blinking Eye Mechanisms

[Whispers]

Lately I've been searching through various forums and websites, collecting various methods on making blinking eye mechanisms. The method I like best so far is threading the ping pong balls onto a wire and making a trigger. However I'd like to hear from fellow puppet builders personal experiences what has worked best with them. Any tips, suggestions, and ideas [along with photos] are welcome. Thanks in advance to any contributions.

 

[itchekadoozy]

I recently made a puppet with a big furry unibrow thingy that sort of doubles as a uni-lash. It's a really simple way of creating a very expressive blink type effect (take a look at marvin in "the sit-in" and "the last show" episodes of the itche kadoozy show.) All it is is a piece of hanger bent into three sides of a square. Poke a hole through the head on the outer sade of each eye. Put the hanger thing inside the head and poke the two ends through the holes. Now bend them around the curve of the eye, or just bend them and the corner at a 45 degree angle. Glue your eyebrow.eyelesh thing on there. If you go with the slant (instead of the form-fitting curve) it creates a happy or surprised look when up and an upset or angry look when down. If the fur is shaggy enough it'll cover the eye enough without an eyelid, but I guess you could go for a lid if you want. The straight bar on the inside gives you a really stable and simple trigger than can be used by any finger that's available (not just the middle).

Hope that helps.

 

[practicecactus]

I posted a detailed description of how I made the blink mech for my last puppet Here with pics.
It works well, and there's still plenty of room for improvement.

Hope that helps give you an idea and where you could take it.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Practice Cactus, do you mind if I add some of those pics and info to the Puppet Building Wiki?

 

[ravagefrackle]

PracticeCactus
Really well done mech solution thier , never been one who could manage those things, just notvery mechanicly minded but that was a great looking solutionCactus

 

[practicecactus]

Buck; Yeah sure man, No worries.

 

[Whispers]

@itchekadoozy thanks I really like the sound of that!

@practicecactus Wow it looks great! Amazing work, I like that method but doubt it'll work for me since my fingers are soo long xD

@Tztz I don't know much about animatronics or mechanical eyes so I'm not sure I'd be able to make one although I wouldn't mind trying. But I doubt the parts are cheap.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

I'm not sure of the method TzTz uses (I'm sure that people would love a tutorial TzTz ) but the parts are relatively cheap if you build or machine everything yourself.

Two good resources are "Figure Making Can Be Fun" by Michael Brose, which has an in depth chaper on making mechs and Mechanics for SPFX Make-up and Mechanical Puppetry (scroll down the page to find it).