How This Guy Makes Puppets That Move Like Real Creatures

[Narrator] A slight wiggle in the hips,

shifting weight from one foot to another,

a turn of the head as if hearing a sound.

Subtle gestures taking a puppet from an inanimate object

to an uncannily real character.

That's the daily experience of this man, Barnaby Dixon,

whose creations have been bringing joy

to millions over the last decade.

The main goal is having people,

in a sense, forget the mechanisms

and forget the process that has gone into making it,

so they can just enjoy the motion.

I think the sooner you can get the audience

to forget that you're there,

the better job you're doing.

I remember, at a certain point, sleeping

and I was having a dream that required me to jump

and instead of me jolting myself awake

I remember waking myself up with,

like, twitching my fingers.

[Narrator] It's not just Barnaby's dedication

to his characters that provide their naturalism.

He's a student of anatomy and movement.

Animals move differently from humans,

but in some, kind of, counterintuitive ways

they can move in a very similar way.

It's, kind of, interesting to look at the anatomy,

like the back legs, for example, of a fox.

You know, it looks like their leg is,

kind of, bending backwards.

You would imagine they have a backwards knee,

but, no, that's their ankle.

Sometimes by focusing on the similarities,

you get a, kind of, more innate sense

of how something would move.

So, in fact, only one leg steps at any one time.

There's probably a little bit of overlap,

but that's generally the case.

If you were to add up

how long I spent thinking about how to make puppets

or what I could implement in puppetry design,

we'd be looking at years at this point, maybe. [chuckles]

[Narrator] Each of Barnaby's myriad creations

has their own unique assembly and operation.

This character's called Phil

and he's a fish and he moves pretty nice

in the air, but very, very nice in water, actually.

The water has a certain resistance

and it really pushes against the fin

in a really, really lovely way.

There is also a mouth mechanism on this one,

so I can open up the mouth like that.

And on the other side of the controls

it has a little space for air, so I squeeze that down.

It travels down this tube here

and then out of the puppet's mouth.

I find it's very engaging, especially in the water.

Okay, so here's a little rundown

of the movement that we're getting so far.

These are nice.

These are quite... couldn't really do this

with other humanoid puppets that I've made.

[Narrator] While he didn't start as a puppeteer,

Barnaby's study of movement goes back years.

So up until around 2014, 2015

I was a stop motion animator.

But when the work takes as long as it does

with stop-motion animation

you want a technique that takes less time,

so that you can simply create more content.

And I, kind of, migrated firstly through

some kind of mix of time lapse and stop-motion

and then eventually was able to make my models

and characters move in real time,

and at that point it probably became puppetry.

Can you see these panels, how they change color?

This is actually a reflective material

and I think it works really well.

I've always made my own puppets because, well,

I didn't know how to make conventional puppets simply.

I drew so much from stop-motion animation in terms

of the movement, but also in terms of the fabrication.

So it's very unlike other styles of puppetry.

So this half of the puppet goes on my left hand here

and these two fingers slot in like that.

Then I have this kind of neck piece here,

goes over the top

and then the head on those two middle fingers

and that gives me the range of motion there.

And this hand goes in the bottom half of the puppet.

The index finger goes in like that

and the pinky finger goes in like that.

And then there's magnets in both segments,

so that they can just clip on like that.

This finger mechanism here,

I can control some of the fingers independently,

like the index finger there.

The beak is also controlled by the thumb.

The two middle fingers hold the torso up

and they also control this mechanism in the head

that gives a side to side motion like that.

And my other hand controls the bottom half of the puppet.

So my index finger controls the left leg,

like that, and the pinky finger controls the right leg.

It's very important to get a believable mass.

If the center of mass seems in the wrong place,

then it's instantly readable.

[bouncy upbeat music]

So there's something in puppetry called sympathetic motion.

Essentially anything that moves

on its own without you controlling it.

So all of these dangly elements here

it's good to make use of them.

That's essentially movement that you get for free.

I think the sympathetic movement adds a degree

of believability because it is responding to actual physics.

Now this one here generates the sound,

that is until we press this button.

The sense of physics too, I think has to be hand up

to some degree so it becomes more readable to the audience.

So when the puppet would jump like this, for example,

it's good to, kind of, get an extra wobble

more than it would actually have

if it was an actual living form.

I think when people think about puppetry

they often think of the Muppets or Sesame Street.

Plenty of puppets

in the Jim Henson world don't have feet so much.

I like to get the feet in to show the, kind of,

full body and see what can be done in terms of that.

But in truth, I think what they do is more important.

These are characters that people have fallen in love with

and hopefully at a certain point I'll get my characters

to that stage with regards to the character development too.

But yeah, they've been doing it longer than me, I suppose.

That's my excuse.

This is apple juice. I promise.

Look, I'll even take a sip.

Ready? [slurps]

[Narrator] Among all of his characters,

Barnaby has a special relationship with his first creation.

So this is Dab Chick.

He's, kind of, the mascot of my channel.

He has a really, really lovely head mechanism, actually.

Very, very responsive.

It works with glasses hinges.

So there's a couple going parallel to each other,

it enables a really smooth controlled motion.

The beak mechanism is very similar

in operation to brake cables on bikes.

Around the outside is a silicon tube,

so it enables the flex.

But inside that

there's actually a wound spring that I've wound myself.

Something subtle that I like a lot actually is

the tail moves in a semi sympathetic way.

So there's a hinge there that will have the tail,

kind of, spread backwards and it seems

like he's, kind of, counterbalancing himself.

It's a nice addition, I think,

but a subtle one and very easy to operate.

He's missing a toe currently

and that's due to the plastic degrading.

There's a little crack in his underside too,

for the same reason, plastic's breaking down a little bit.

[Narrator] Luckily for Dab Chick,

Barnaby's experience building his own puppets

also gives him a lot of experience fixing them.

So I've had this version of Dab Chick since 2018

and in that time some of the plastic's degraded.

You can see where I've fixed a little bit there.

But I do want to duplicate certain elements

so that when something more important like the face goes

I'll have the option to swap it out.

So what I'll be using to duplicate the head is this mold.

This was actually cast off the original Dab Chick

from the end of 2014, actually,

so this is fairly ancient.

But what I will do is I will use the same plastic,

heat it up, push it into this mold, pull it out

and hopefully we'll get something that's good to go.

This material, although it is very useful

in lots of ways, you can reheat it.

If something goes wrong, reheat it and remold with it.

It is very hard to work with actually.

It's somewhat rubbery.

So you'll move it in a certain position

and there's a degree of spring back.

If you make it too hot, it can burn you quite horribly too.

So it's not a material that I like, necessarily,

but it is practical in so many other respects

that I found myself using it a lot.

So the name Dab Chick comes from a name that my granddad

would call his grandkids.

So me included.

When I made the bird puppet,

it just, kind of, popped into my head.

I was like, Oh, that's perfect.

Ah, that looks great. Look at that.

And a really nice color too.

Very similar. Or at least similar enough.

So when I design the puppets,

I limit the materials that I use.

This plastic makes up a large part of the build process.

There's some miniature engineering, like silver soldering.

Other than the plastic,

some silicon and some metal elements.

It's really quite limited,

which is quite useful for maintenance reasons

because you can keep just a limited amount

of materials to hand.

[Narrator] Dab Chick may be Barnaby's oldest

and most emblematic creation, but he's always

trying to push the boundaries of what his puppets can do.

So I have this series on my channel

that this puppet hosts.

It's kind of a ghost storytelling series.

The unique feature about this puppet is, I think,

the screen on the face, which is, actually,

my face streamed in real time onto the screen.

So because my mouth is part of the movement,

I move my mouth in a bit more of an exaggerated way

than I would normally move it.

[Narrator] With his puppets fabricated and repaired

as needed Barnaby can dedicate himself to creating stories

and sharing his characters with the world.

I think some days,

especially if I'm working on a big project,

it's quite common for me to put in 16 hours

or something like that.

Essentially, when I wake up to when I go to sleep,

I'm just working on the film the whole time.

I think people are initially drawn to my work

because they haven't seen puppetry like this before.

But I hope, eventually, the takeaway is

that people almost, kind of, forget

that puppetry is involved at all.

And I think when you get to that level

of suspension of disbelief, you've done your job well.

[Narrator] While Barnaby has created his own methods

to inspire wonder through his puppets,

he doesn't feel there's a correct way to approach the craft.

For someone that's getting into puppetry

I would advise them, almost, to not look what's out there,

to try and experiment and figure out

what else could be contributed to the art form.

I almost wouldn't wanna prescribe any rules, you know,

just see what's possible because I think there's a heck

of a lot possible that we've not explored yet.