Production Concept: Puppet Design

Stage 3

This is the finished design for ‘Sally’. We are really pleased with her look, shape and colour.

Her glasses have been put on a chain which is a feature we liked. The reason for this is to exaggerate her character as a stereotypical  ‘book-worm’ and would be a certain trait which she would have when it comes to reading from her book, she will put her glasses on.

Her clothes really compliment her features and the colour change for her hair makes her more attractive to the younger eye being the little bit more colourful and youthful.

Production Concept: Puppet design

Stage Two

Discussing the parts of the design which I was unhappy with, these are the changes we decied would be more suitable for her appearance...

Our overall look for ‘Sally’ had changed, making her more friendly and happy looking. We changed the colour of her hair to purple to emphasize her features as a puppet.  We have also changed the colour of her nose, which again exaggerates her puppet features giving her a real ‘muppet ‘ style look.

Her clothes are exactly how we wanted them from our character profile and have added small feature such as a pen to her waistcoat and a brooch to her collar as small traits that will be identifiable by the audience.

These sketches designs show ‘Sally’ without her glasses. This was purely for design purposes to show her full features. She has rounded eyes, which are close together and an oval nose that is common for most

muppet-esque style puppets.

Her body will be made of felt instead of fur to emphasize the fact that she is a human character and not a monster. She will be bright yellow in colour and will be a typical rod-and-arm style puppet. This means she will only be visible from the waist up and will only need one puppeteer to control her.

Production Concept: PUPPET design

Stage One

Our Graphic Designer that was helping to colour our set for us, Rio, kindly offered to do all of our clouding for our designs. This meant not only did we have one artist who was able to see the project throughout it's whole process but a graphic designer on hand to help with any digital reds we had.

Initial designs for ‘Sally’ were drawn up by our artist after discussions of how we wanted her to look. There were a few features which we were and weren’t happy with. We firstly wasn’t sure about her size and thought she should be a bit slimmer and younger looking. We also wanted to make her head more rounded.

The original character profile for Sally also had brown/brunette hair. We were unhappy with her hair colour as it clashed too much with her waistcoat and discussed with our collaborators about the colours that would compliment her body colour.

Production Concept: Puppet Design

After no longer being able to work with our desired puppet designer, Katie agreed to help me out with he sketches and signs for Sally.

This is some of the information we wrote up initially on how we would like Sally to look...

Production Concept: Logo design

Stage One

The Logo was something that is really important to the show as it becomes so identifiable with children.

Rather than just use text as our brand image, we wanted to incorporate ‘Sally’ so that it would become instanty recogniseable to any child that had seen the show.

We had some designs drawn up which we looked at and spoke about colour, attractiveness and similarity to other shows that we would be competing with.

The font style was important, being targeted at a young age range, it had to be clear, bold and stand out in colour without becoming to unclear to read.

Our favorite design was the second sketch we received with bubble style writing and with the incorporation of our puppet character as part of the logo.

We then started to think about colouring and what would be suited for our show.

Production Concept: Logo design

Sourcing a Graphic Designer who was able to provide me with a Logo Design was a difficult task with the budget I had. After the after the great sketch of the set design, I asked the same friend, Katie Diplock, if she would be able to help with the logo design. Luckily, she said she would help with not only the logo, but with designing the whole puppet. This was a huge part of the project which I would struggle with myself so to find a willing contributor to follow through with all aspects pf design including the puppet and logo.

I decided that I wanted to incorporate features from our idea into the logo for it to become more relatable to its young audience. Katie and I spoke about how we could bring aspects of the show into the Branding. Our first idea was to make the Text of the logo sit in front of the outside of the shop. I liked this idea, but as we only see the shop front in the opening sequence to the show, I thought it wasn't identifiable enough to the show to use as part of the identity and branding. The next idea was incorporate the characters in some way. This would mean using cartoon version of them within the image. I liked this idea, but wasn't sure about making our main human presenter (Sid Sloane) into a cartoon as this may be confusing for children of such a young age. We decided to produce a logo that would incorporate a cartoon of Sally (puppet presenter). This would be much easier for the audience to identify. She then went away to draw up some designs for me from texts that I liked.

Initially, I liked this text design, we spoke about how legible it is for children and how we could colour it. Here are two of the options; 1 - colour the outline and fill the characters with block or coloured patterns with different colours, or, 2 - colour the characters one colour and leave the infills of each character plain. I did like this font but also wanted to look at there options.

Production Concept: Set Design

So having the set sketch complete with a guide to I wanted the set to look, I then set out to find an artist who could digitalise these images with colour as a conceptual idea for how the set would look. I found a Graphic Designer named Rio Collins who is from Maidstone. Also in her last year of her Graphic Design Degree, she was more than happy to help with our sets with the digital versions. i was able to send her the designs for her to play with and discussed how I wanted them to look.