When someone asks if you’re willing to help build five dragon heads, and you’re as into dragons as I am, you say yes. It’s that simple. Bringing five dragon puppets to life is not however as simple as saying yes to building five dragon puppets, and thus I invite you to follow along in this insane build. But before we can build, we need a plan, and we need personnel.
Pierre Players Community Theater’s production of She Kills Monsters is directed by Lydia Kanz with Tyson Nafus as assistant director. They brought Blake Messegee (Artistof1000Faces on Etsy) in as lead monster designer, and added me to the crew for dragon engineering and frame construction. Rounding out the creative team were Jen Kanz on costumes, Wynne Nafus Sayer on props and other incidentals, Scott Hipple on set construction and any cast and crew members with a brush and a dream for anything we missed or no longer had brain power for.
I joined in pretty late. The year was a pretty tumultuous one for me and I was flying right off a massive garden bed project that still isn’t technically done, but my spouse encouraged me to follow my dreams and commit to this production even if it meant their beds would be on hold for a few more months. I don’t regret it at all though, as I think the time crunch led to some creative decisions that helped more than hurt.
Blake had sketches of all five dragons ready to go and as I said repeatedly on set, I am so glad Lydia had him take lead on the design and not me. I think I could’ve come up with some okay dragons, but they might’ve either leaned too heavily on DND canon or they would’ve ended up a little same-sy. Blake has a knack for the monstrous and created five designs that really look like an evil dragon goddess. I’m a dragon rider, not a dragon slayer, and Tiamat is a final boss. Slaying her is literally the point of the play!
In essence, my job was to create five individual armatures for Blake to paper mache, and make those armatures articulate with actor input during the show. The biggest head would be the least articulate, while the smallest two would be full-on puppets carried by performers. Tyson had already measured the stage and figured out the sizes of each dragon, which provided some extremely helpful constraints on the designs. The biggest head was to be 6 foot long and 3 foot wide, and the smallest were 3 foot long and a foot and a half wide. The resulting size differences would make them all look roughly equal to the audience during the final battle. To start visualizing, I tossed the front and side views of Black (my favorite of the five heads) into OnShape to see what the key areas to support would be, but I fucking hate OnShape and so abandoned this in favor of just blowing Blake’s sketches up to scale and glueing them to styrofoam. Sometimes the luddites are right, I don’t know what else to say.
With a visual of the size, I immediately knew I had to go back to my old middle school robotics days of using a heat gun on PVC to bend it into weird shapes.
Above is Black Knight, which I think was our 2007 offering? I’ve slept since then. But this time honored technique has been passed down through generations of goofball NASA brats so it was sure to work pretty well here. Talking with Blake and seeing what other people have done for their giant dragon puppet armatures (since both She Kills Monsters and Shrek the Musical are super popular and feature giant dragon puppets) we decided to use bent PEX and PVC covered in chicken wire for the big three, and bent PEX covered in upholstery foam for the smaller two. With that nailed down, it was time to go get materials and get to construction. But first, a quick detour back to the start of the project:
Here’s where I have to confess to being kind of a bad engineer: I HATE CANTILEVERED JOINTS. I am SO bad about this and frankly I think one of the worst things about the final product on these dragons is the way I hinged the lower jaws off of the upper jaws. It caused so many problems, especially with the little puppets. You can sort of see in my mockup here that I just have a single dowel rod ran through the whole width of the head. The big ones are just like this mockup. Anyways, back to initial construction.
Each dragon features a central hinge made of a wood dowel rod with chipboard cheek plates nested in a corresponding PVC pipe with flanges. The upper jaw armature is attached to the wood dowel while the lower jaw armature attaches to the flanges. Each jaw consists of a minimum of a U shape for the lips and a vertical piece defining the centerline of each jaw.
Blue and Green, the two medium dragons, have their jaw armatures made entirely of PEX, which is more flexible than PVC. As such both had to have some additional supports added in, visible in the photos above, and Blue ended up with an unintentional snarl that added to her charm. For the most part our workflow was: cut pipe/tubing to size, heat with heat gun and bend to shape, shore up with structural members, and zip tie everything together.
As each frame was completed, Blake covered the jaws first in chicken wire and then in 5 base layers of paper mache. For the eyes, we used clear Christmas ornaments split in half with a saw and Blake molded them into the face. Until the wall mounts were ready for each of the big three, we had to come up with some interesting rigging to allow access to all sides. From the chicken wire step forward on all but Black, Blake worked more or less solo. He is a total machine when it comes to paper mache, working swiftly and deftly to create the organic forms of nostrils and spines and brow ridges.
It would have been much better in terms of order-of-operations to have built the wall mounts before the armatures, but for the most part my ideas for mounting the Big 3 were not too far off from what we were able to actually do. When Tyson first suggested that Green and Blue would swing from the side walls, I could only think of a chain link fence hinge, and designed a triangular wooden frame to screw to the cheek plates that could then attach to the chain link fence post. A simple 2×4 frame attached the other side of the hinge to the wall. With all the nuts tightened properly, this is shockingly sturdy and swings quite smoothly. We did have to retighten a few times, but got all the kinks worked out well before preview night. The set builders got Red’s platform up in-between and Blake had the funny idea of throwing Blue’s real-size sketch onto the platform as a reference while he continued to sculpt her features.
With Green and Blue well on their way to being sculpted, I got to work on Red’s frame. Big Red has the least movement of the five dragons and so got a portion of her mounting structure built into her jaws with 1x4s. Because there’s less of a weight concern as well, I went from PEX to PVC for her and was very glad I did. While she lost a little bit of symmetry, it wasn’t as bad as with the PEX, and the end result was far more rigid for Blake’s paper mache. We hung her from the center platform so he could start in on chicken wire and paper and I moved onto the puppets. As I worked at those, Blake put the pedal to the metal and made Big Red beautifully intimidating. He used expanding foam and cardboard to create the horns, and went through enough cans that he nixed the three fins he had put in Big Red’s initial design sketch.
