Meet JP.
JP (Julien Puppet) was my first foray into the long, storied art of puppet making. I was following the footsteps of the puppet legends that came before me like Jim Henson, and. Um. Others, I assume?
music vI believe it was our bass player, Cole, who threw out the initial idea of making sock puppets for our lead single “Oh, Julien!”
That night, I started mapping out the narrative for the video and I had a dumb thought:
“Humanoid puppets can’t be that much harder than sock puppets, can they?”
Three YouTube tutorials later, my reckless confidence and artistic ambition got the better of me. I decided I was going to make a puppet for all three members of the band.
The more observant readers might notice that JP, our friendly puppet friend from the top of this page, is not one of these three names.
That’s because my dumb thought was, in fact, dumb. Making a humanoid puppet is SIGNIFICANTLY harder than a sock puppet.
About halfway through making JP, I decided that I was going to focus on ONE humanoid puppet, and figure out the rest of the video once that was done.
I started out by making the head. I cut two foam pieces and glued them together down the middle to make a helmet shape. I draped that in felt and hand-sewed a snug-fitting “sock” to cover the foam. The mouth needed structure, so I wrapped two thin pieces of cardboard in red felt and hot glued it to the head. Then I spent about 30 minutes gently harassing my dog with the disembodied head before I moved on to the face.
I bought some giant googly eyes and made some eyelids out of felt that I hot glued on. The lips and tongue needed a bunch of reshaping to look right, but were also just glued-on felt.
The ears were each made from two disc-shaped pieces of felt sewed together with some hand-stitched detail for the inner part.
The nose, however, was a pain in the ass. I tried 5 different shapes, none of which were working.
Too bulky, too narrow, too wide, ugh. I ended up just bunching up some of my left over felt scraps and tightly wrapping them to make a little ball. I think it’s cute. Onto hair.
I’m no barber, but messing with the hairstyles was one of my favorite parts of this project.
I bought three different colored sheets of synthetic fur to try out some different looks.
I didn’t know that there’s a right way to cut a fur sheet, so little shavings ended up everywhere.
After a vacuum, I settled on black, and gave our boy some eyebrows, arms, and a styling.
By this point, I’m around 11 hours of work into this project. JP was done (outfitted by the children’s section of my local Walmart), but I couldn’t bring myself to make two more of these things.
I had to pivot. I decided to revisit our original sock puppet idea and make three little alien guys to represent each band member.
Meet The Hooligans.
With the squad assembled, it was time to start working on the video.
It was looking completely different from how I’d originally thought it up.
But diving headfirst into this realm of art that I knew absolutely nothing about gave me a laissez-faire approach to making this video that I’d never had before.
Creating this silly little guys reminded me of a quote my grandfather used to say:
“Take what you do seriously, but never take yourself seriously.”
We’d just spent months working on the EP and planning a tour, and stress was high around the release of these singles.
But the puppets reminded me to just enjoy the process of making art.
I love being in a band and I’m so lucky that I get to perform music for people, so I hope some of that joy comes through in the music video these puppets starred in.
Felix Tandem
