Articulation of a tenticle.



Prototyped articulating tentacles
Jay Templeton 2010



When working on "the Muckleman" during Nearly Naked Theater's season ending in 2010 Jay did some intense work to create tentacles capable of coiling and moving in a somewhat realistic manner.  Jay and I have many shared passions which bring us together in these creative efforts but we remain vastly foreign beings in many other areas. 



Jay Templeton 2010



I am ever annoyed by his halting start to things as he laboriously prepares a mock up, prototype or painstakingly planned pattern to follow.  By now however I have seen the benefits to his more tentative starts.  Usually he can use his planned attack and predetermined measurements to produce objects more closely modeled to recreate a given object, building, or special effects related prop.  His dancing Rats for Reefer Madness, functional and matching perfume infusers in small and large form for Rock horror, The false fronted necronomicron used to make it look as if it opened on its own and the pages then glowed and swirled with writing and pictures (Evil Dead), and of course the previously featured mouse head along with animatronic beaver also for evil dead.

However there are those efforts which brilliant they may be sadly never make it out of the Wicked Queens Rand D department.  This was the case with his tentacles.  All in all he did six mock ups.  They started with a series of disks threaded in a certain fashion but wanting a greater functionality and the ability to support themselves better as if they where moving while floating in water and so where passed over for his much more intricately made PVC tentacles.  These required filing and cutting individual segments out of PVC that would then be riveted together.  This design was inspired ignominiously by schematics for an endoscopy camera mount as would be used during a colonoscopy. 



Prototyped articulating tentacles by Jay Templeton 2010

  Unfortunately the much more promising effect they could produce was not enabling quite what we had hoped and with the opening day upon us we abandoned the prototypes all together and used some plastic channel material covered to look like the squid which wiggled a bit like they where in watter.  In the production I have to give credit to the set designer and the puppeteer for achieving something rather effective with what could have fallen so short of what was needed that it proved distracting and effectively diminished the final work which gladly they did not.

In working on a slew of Items for the first show for the 2011 year "Devil Boys from outer space" one of the fun challenges was to make an alien in a jar that looked almost like what how one might picture an alien baby that would surprise the actors and hopefully the audience when it leaps from the jay and sucks onto one of the characters faces.  I did some pre-work prototyping for once as did Jay and we tried to have a mechanism that would pop open like a yawning moth which would not be quite where you would have thought since the head would have a sort of cute and familiar look but then separate like the head was splitting open.  Both my segmented false face and Jays mechanical mouth device where fraught with problems and they where not coming together well at all.  We must of re tooled the thing four times and at last resigned to a more static creature that had no moving articulated components.

While this last planned project  may be laid to rest along with the articulated tentacles in the veritable graveyard or orphanage like closet of other half com pleated and rejected props and costume elements the death certainly is not without meaning or value.  It is that striving to challenge our work to take up a next novelty or sophistication, utilize an unfamiliar material, or in any of a number of ways to expand our knowledge and range of experience in our design work.  And that strive and drive to challenge ourselves in such ways offers a vitality, professional dedication, and quality of personal fulfillment that fuels the other work and must, I believe, result in what we do finally take to the stage possessing some of the charge and exacting attention which was aroused by those more noble if not fully realized aims.