As many of you know, I’m currently working on creating a stop-motion animated LEGO version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Initially I wanted the whole cast to be made of minifigures, however as I was unable to find adequate official LEGO parts to create custom figures, I came up with a new solution: to use bobble head puppets! This method actually benefits the video production in many ways:

1) It gives me more freedom to create facial expressions and comical appearances. This also allows me to construct character faces from scratch, rather than relying on official available LEGO minifig heads.

2) The puppet mouths will be easier for lip-sync and articulated animation. For Alice and the other few characters with normal minifig heads, lip-sync will be done through animation in Adobe After Effects, whereas the bulk of the cast will have articulated faces like puppets. The puppet heads can even have interchangeable tongue pieces to make certain speech appear more genuine.

3) This method actually sticks more true to the original illustrations in Lewis Carroll’s book. In the books, Alice was drawn to look like a realistic human girl, whilst the supporting characters (e.g. Hatter, Queen of Hearts, Duchess) were given warped, distorted features to emphasize their bizarre character traits. By making my Alice a regular minifig and making everyone else a weird bobble head monster, I believe this adds much more substance to the artistic style!

Currently I’m finishing up the script and building the cast of characters. Once the storyboard is laid out, I’ll record voices, and then begin practicing more with using Dragonframe software!