Ultraman Towards the Future AKA Ultraman Great part 14

 In one episode I made a breakaway miniature agricultural shed for a Locust creature to trash.

The giant Locust critter called Majaba was made as a puppet. It had leds inside its eyes to make them glow as well as a pretty cool translucent paint job.

The puppet crew consisted of Steve Roswell, Vicki Kite, Graham Binding, Norman Yeend and Warren Beaton.

 

The picture below shows the puppet and miniature shed waiting for action to be called. The shed had to match the one filmed at the live action location.

Here, the puppet is in the middle of destroying the miniature shed.

 

The shed was built on a solid chipboard base with a balsa wood timber structure lightly superglued together.

  

Paul Fardouly (left) rigged up a press so we could stamp out corrugated sheets of aluminium fin stock with the correct scale corrugations. On the right you can see the completed balsa timber framing that has been stained a dark colour. I am in the process of attaching the miniature corrugated sheets to the structure using small dots of superglue and zip kicker. This had to be fragile to break apart easily.

 

Here I am just adding the last corrugated sheets to the front of the shed. The corrugated sheets were pre-painted before attaching to the frame work.

The puppet was also used for flying scenes and had a motorised wing mechanism built into it.

 

In the episode the creature meets a fiery demise so the puppet was rigged up with some pyrotechnic material that was electrically ignited during the shot. You can see the ignition wires running down the side of the puppet.

The pyrotechnic material was ignited and the puppet performed as designed.