Broken foot, broken leg, broken puppet.

Puppets break. We all knew this. But still when it happens, you are not prepared for it.

The foot of our puppet broke during a very important walking-scene. As the shot was taken from above, we managed to "hide" her injury more or less. Because we didn't had the time to repair her, we just went on with other scenes, in which the legs weren't seen. The puppet was tied down to different objects in order to not move, but during the animation process, she got weaker and weaker. When one of the legs fell of completely, we had to take a decision, how we proceed.

As we still had two scenes with this character to do, we decided to take the time to repair the puppet. First we tried to fix the broken parts of the puppet, by taking off some layers of thread and adding wire. But the puppet was at the end of it's life with no hope of rescue. We had to build a new one.

We still had an unfinished body, which was our first attempt of constructing the final puppet. Due to broken hands, we never finished it. But now it was the only solution of building a new puppet in one day. We cut off her armes and replaced them with an extra pair we had made, in order to have the same strong wrist-structure, as the last puppet. The former head was removed and put on the new body, which saved us a lot of work.

Now we had to wrap the threads around the body, in order to be similar to the original puppet. The feet were added and then the last layer of threads. In the end everything went better than expected and the next morning the puppet was already in the set, ready to shoot the next scene.