Constructing the Big Hands

With our puppets almost ready, it was time to move on to the "big" hands:

We knew that the size of the puppet would be a problem for the real close shots where we would see the details and texture of the hands. After figuring out the story board, we saw we had a lot of shots of the hands playing with the strings or constructing, so building a bigger set of hands was the most evident solution.

At the beginning, we wanted to make one pair of hands that we could modified throughout the shooting of the scenes. First it would be full hands covered in threads, then a half-empty which you would see a little bit of the wire skeleton under, and finally the hands would end up empty, shooing the wire structure completely and just a few threads hanging.

Pretty early in the construction tests we realized it was better to build three different set of hands for each of this moments; that way we wouldn't be forced to shoot the scenes chronologically and the final look of the hands would be exactly like we wanted it.

To keep the proportions with the puppet's small hands, we used a thicker thread and we tested how the texture looked in a close up. Even thought it wasn't essential that the big hands were exactly the same color and texture as the small ones, we wanted to keep certain coherence between both.

Because the three "stages" of the hands were quite different looking, the way of constructing them also changed a lot:

The full hand needed a strong and resistant wire armature inside, because we would animate more scenes with them. The filling was made out of sponge and we winded several layer of threads. We specially liked the combination of the colors in this layers, and how the texture of the threads looked in the close ups, because you could really tell that the character was filled with this material, not only in the exterior.

For the half empty hands we knew that we would start to show the inside of the character, half thread / half wire. The structure shape was the same as the full hand, but with no sponge. We were searching for a very specific look of the "wire net" that was supposed to be inside the hand, and for this we tried different materials we found, such a strainers, kitchen trays, etc. (See preview post about Wire Net)

The problem with this materials is that they were really stiff and wouldn't move with the hand as we wanted. So in the end we decided to construct our own nets (what's a little extra work?). We figure out a way to weave the thinest wire and make it look like a net with volume and also it could bend as we animated.

This wire net was used for the half-empty and for the empty big hand, putting more surface of it in the empty one witch doesn't have that much thread to cover it. We made a really conscious decision of letting this last structure not as firm and strong as the other ones. We had very clear we only needed this hand for one shot, so it wasn't crucial that the structure was so strong, and we prioritized for the aesthetic of the hand.

All three models of the hands had a forearm made out of the thickest wire to later join the rigs for animating.The construction of this hands was a slower process than we expected, because we had to match what we wanted to express visually with the closeup of the hand during the story, and also the practical handling of the structure and the rigs for animating in a efficient way.