It was finally time for our final projects. We had already been tld that the theme would be "puppets". Me and Christine were already partners and we stayed so. Marie also joined us as we came together to become the only and most awesome trio of the class. We had a number of ideas and had a lot of fun discussing different kinds of puppets. We went online and looked at many examples on the first day. We saw a lot of animal puppets, some marionettes and a few sock puppets. I liked the idea of a dancing puppet and suggested we build one. I thought we could incorporate many popular songs and dance routines into our project, such as the Macarena, The Ketchup Song and TunakTunak Tun. We went through many versions of this dancing puppet before we decided that an elephant would be the greatest. We wanted this elephant to be able to turn on its bottom, have huge ears that move when there is a sound, and a waving snout. We also wanted it to be able to do the dances associated with the previously mentioned songs. This was the first of our ideas that we really developed.
Another idea we had was “Wendy Wellesley” puppet. We wanted a puppet head that looked like a regular girl from Wellesley College. She would be a good friend who listened to you said reassuring things. We also wanted to make sure she looked like she was paying attention. Therefore, we would program her eyeballs so that they followed people around her. Her eyelids would close and maybe even wink. Her eyebrows would also move to produce expressions. She might even yawn.
A couple of cool ideas came from Christine. She suggested sock puppets. We’d have a boy and a girl sock puppet that would pretend to talk to each other when they detected conversation. They would recognize pitch and the boy would assume the identity of the person with lower pitch while the girl would talk when the higher pitched person talked. We also talked about having a move that they would do when someone talked for too long. Another idea she had was a shadow puppet version of Wendy Wellesley in case the design was too hard to carry out.
We presented these ideas to the class and got feedback from them. It was clear that the theme of the year was creepy robots. The following eyes of Wendy fit quite well into this theme and it received positive responses. The elephant was also popular. As a result, we chose Wendy and the elephant as the projects we wanted to focus on.We realized that another group also considered building a dancing robot so we decided to develop Wendy further. We added some other features, suchas full head rotation, being mounted on the wall and creepy lines, to strengthen the creepiness of our puppet. We then presented our more-developed ideas to Chris at Tufts. This visit confirmed Wendy as our final project.
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