How was Animal's unibrow created to move?

[mathlizard]

Hello,
I'm wondering how animal's unibrow was created/ rigged to move?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Eg25_aoWcwA#t=31s

I found how to make the standard muppet eye from plastic spoons, but there were no details on moving parts:

I was also looking at the yoda rig:

How do his eyes move and what's Yoda made out of? (rubber?) what's a process for creating a character similar to Yoda (other than lots of practice and skill) ?

^ this is a replica, any guesses to how it was made?

 

[mathlizard]

okay, I found the "making of" website for Yoda. I google searched "Jörg Steegmüller Yoda" and came up with this result eventually:
http://www.starwars-union.de/index.php?id=fan_makingyoda

http://www.yasni.de/ext.php?url=http://www.starwars-union.de/sw/fan_makingyoda/seite/fotos/&name=Jörg Steegmüller&cat=filter&showads=1
Where do I get the resources? any idea of how to get started?
from the pictures it looks like you start with a sculpt in clay, then create a caste, then replace that with silica rubber, then somehow create an eye rig . I'm most interested in the eye rig at this point.

 

[Animal31]

Animal is done with a pretty simple lever trick, if you look thru some of the older forums there are a few tutorials around. The one thing to point out is Animals eyes are round, not the flat spoon shape, more like Oscar...

 

[Muppetlab]

Check out this link..
http://doublerainbowpuppets.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/eye-blink-rigs-complete.html?m=1

This is probably the easiest and most common method of making simple blinking eye mechs

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Yoda is a much, much more complicated puppet to build. Yoda's skin was cast in foam latex, although if he was made today he would probably be cast in silicone, which is a more life-like material to cast skin with. His "skull" underneath is cast in fibreglass I believe, which is very common with animatronic puppets.

A good source for information on building animatronic characters in the Stan Winston School of Character Arts, which offers a lot of great online video courses.