I asked Ron to share some thoughts about the evolution of his puppet designs, how they work, and the challenges involved in creating them:

I had a previous background of 20 years in stop-motion, live-action puppets, and cable controls. Part of my inspiration for getting into cable controls came from a shot Rick Baker did for the 1976 remake of King Kong, where Kong drew a breath and blew on the actress after she fell in the waterfall. The cable control technology had been well established further on films like American Werewolf in London and E.T. This other work for live-action monster effects had been done with different heads that each did one part of the facial movement. E.T. was one of the only characters made to fully speak, and he would speak in slow motion. My challenge was to miniaturize it and do it frame by frame. With this kind of cable system, there are always tension problems to overcome, and the cables need to be delicate but strong. The skin is paper thin at times, and so many things occur about what nature actually does. For example, not only do lips stretch open, but often there are moments where you need open jaws with the lips closed in order to get many different shapes which happen rather frequently. It’s easy to have cables pulling the lips apart, but not pushing, so I needed to have metal pieces inside the lips to push them closed. I also needed to make the world’s smallest hinge for a metal piece that had to bend outwards.

[Figure 3.100] The junction box for Isomer’s cable control system. (© Ron Cole.)

A big challenge with this system, which I learned with my first puppet, Trevor, is that the cables would tend to break in the control box end. Because they had tension on them, they would get sucked inside the tube and would not be retrievable, unless I opened up the puppet to get the cable out. So, for Isomer, I built a junction box (Figure 3.100) between the control box and the puppet, and split the cables into two halves. Inside the box, the wires were bundled very close together, so I created a map under the lid to indicate which hole and which wire goes where.

[Figure 3.101] Isomer’s cable control box, labeled with functions of the different dials. (© Ron Cole)

On the control box side, there are two types of controls: ones that only pull the cable and others that have a dual function. The dual function controls are only the eyebrows; turning the knob left brings the brow down, and right brings them up. I managed to do that by finding a way to attach two cables to the same controller, which both pull, but in opposite directions. The cables for the face are controlled by 16 dials (Figure 3.101), which achieve the following functions:

1) Outside left eyebrow up and down
2) Inside left eyebrow up and down
3) Inside right eyebrow up and down
4) Outside right eyebrow up and down
5) Left crow’s feet up
6) Right crow’s feet up
7) Bridge of nose up
8) Top lip up
9) Bottom lip down
10) Lips form "O" toward top teeth
11) Lips form "O" toward bottom teeth
12) Left side smile
13) Right side smile
14) Left side frown
15) Right side frown
16) Jaw open