Ha-hah! Look what I won!
So I entered a contest on Atop the Fourth Wall, and I won! Check it out, here’s a link to the winners video:
http://atopfourthwall.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/pollo-contest-winners.html
Atop the Fourth Wall is a web show about comics — reviewing terrible comics, for the most part. I enjoy it, though I often don’t agree with reviewer Linkara’s thoughts on comics. Still, he’s interesting and generally fun to watch, even if I don’t always agree. He had a contest to redesign his robot prop (it was previously just a static prop) with the idea being it needed a Cylon-style eye, and some design elements from the original incorporated. Anyway, I thought I’d post up my entry here and give my thoughts on it.
First of all… I didn’t really concentrate TOO much on revamping the design. I liked the mupetty simplicity of the original Pollo robot, so I stuck fairly close to the original design. The main thing I concentrated on was giving the existent design more mobility.
So this is more-or-less the last page I finished. When I do these sorts of designs I tend to draw a really rough finished design, then refine it as the details come together in the other design sections.
I wanted to suggest how things could be built, not just how things could look. So I tried to imagine the components and how they could be created structurally as a puppet. I’m not actually a designer, so I imagine this will need a lot of revision to make it work exactly as it should.
I wanted some sort of design elements that would subvert expectations of the current design. This is why I included the idea that the current Pollo’s chest decoration and stub arms would be able to conceal more ‘real’ arms and and the chest gun. The use of the cup idea is because I realised that this wasn’t an expensive production — it should be buildable from cheap, easy to access parts.
Because Atop the Fourth Wall is mostly a one-person operation I wanted the design of the puppet to be as one-person as possible. So I wanted Pollo to be able to be used just by sitting him on a desk, or some other surface, so the puppeteer wouldn’t have to support his weight for a long time. The reason for two handles is because it’s hard to support something’s weight with the same handle you’re using to manipulate it. Here’s hoping these ideas actually work out well for the finished design.
I like the idea of a spring, but obviously springs can be tricky to use. I imagined something like a slinky spring — very flexible and highly mobile. But if that didn’t work I wanted to offer an alternate suggestion of how you could have the same effect of collapsible arm sections. I also like the idea of seperate hand attachments, as seen here. After all, why not?
Plus, hey, I did an ink drawing here!
I don’t know what a “Bloomberg reading” is. I’ve never even heard of “Bloomberg radiation”. Just so’s you know, I think I just made that shit up. This final page was basically a proof-of-concept page, showing how the various design elements for the pupeteering would work in practical terms. I… uh… think I drew this before I knew that Linkara and Iron Liz weren’t together any more. Oh well.
–Andrew S.
