Overcomplication.

As some of you may be aware, we here at Hoggworks are starting on dotBoom season 2. There will be much talk in the near future about the design and construction phases of this process, looking at what it’s like to rebuild a puppet while trying to improve it (something we just did in our upgrading of Mojo), so this post reflects just one aspect of this. And actually it’s not even directly related to dotBoom, though it is related to one of the main characters of the first season, Brian.

This is how Brian looked in the first season of the show:

He’s a very simple puppet. He was built using the Glorified Sock Puppet Pattern from Project Puppet, which is a great pattern; if you’ve any interest in learning puppetry, that pattern in specific, and Project Puppets patterns in general, represent a great first step. They’re also cost-effective.

Going into season 2, the idea is to build new versions of all of the puppets, considering how much better we’ve gotten at making them. So just about every character who’ll appear in season 2 will be rebuilt (the exceptions are characters who’ll appear only in the background, in non-speaking roles). This initially excluded Brian.

At the end of season one of dotBoom, Brian leaves the company to pursue a career as a writer. As such, he’s gone from the company, and the intent was that he’d be gone from the show, for the most part. The first time we were looking at mounting season 2 of the show, we worked up a gag where he’d appear in a cameo in the season premiere (I won’t share exactly how, as we’re still hoping to use those storylines at some point), and so, as part of that, the decision was made to rebuild him.

We considered just exactly how to rebuild him — which changes would be made to his character visually — but decided that since he was so visually simple, any real changes to the structure would come off as unnecessary, and would change the spirit of the character: we decided that a Brian 2.0 should be made with the Sock Puppet Pattern. That said, he still should be more refined looking, and the question quickly became how to do that. One thing that had always bugged me about the way I half-assed Brian’s initial build was his hands — there’s no foam in them, so they’re quite limp.

So Brian 2 would need non-limp hands, with poseable fingers.

And a better tongue/uvula combination.

And thanks to a tip from the immensely talented Phillip Hatter, we’ve started painting our puppet eyes in a way that makes them look fantastic. So his eyes should be better (Brian 1.0′s pupils are just markered on).

Also, he ought to be a full body puppet, so he needs legs.

This is the design for Brian 2.0 that we came up with a number of months ago:

I dig this design because it still looks like Brian, but it looks also like it’s more of Brian, and that’s a good thing. So we started building. We got about halfway through the build, and were inevitably distracted by other things — paying work kicks non-paying work to the curb, after all — and when we were able to return to him a couple months ago, I felt, rather arbitrarily, like he needed more. So as I finally gave this new Brian eyes (which look cool, all nicely painted and with glue-on pupils), I thought that he needed closeable eyes. Brian is on The Rant Puppets now, and I like the idea of him being able to close his eyes as he reacts to something he dislikes, or open them wider in shock at whatever ridiculous thing he’s complaining about. So I gave him the closeable eyes.

And he looked like crap:

Giving him eyebrows needlessly overcomplicated his face, changing his character. Add to that the fact that the eyes weren’t seated properly, and that the eyelids themselves were put on poorly, you’ve got me turning Brian from a cute, wide-eyed little programmer to a drunken lounge-lizard.

So Brian 2.0′s head will be rebuilt completely, and he’ll have no moving eyelids. He’ll have the other improvements, most likely, because they won’t change the way he looks. But the space the eyelids had to occupy changed him too much. To be fair, there’s something I really like about the way those eyes would make a character look; I just hate the way they make Brian look.

This is a very obvious lesson, I know, but I felt like taking the time to point it out.