Read the previous post - the pitch - here.

The first design taken care of, I moved onto designing the next three. The ‘city’ area - with the urban buildings - was to have a moving Lego minifig (minifig or minifigure is the technical term for Lego people), a cop. That was the easy part. Taking an idea from a previous puppetry show at uni, I decided that the buildings in the city should light up. (While not technically a moveable part, I do count this as one of the three moveable parts in the urban area of the city)… What to do for the last part? A lift! An elevator in one of the buildings was a neat addition, and as it happens, a perfect fit for part of the song.

The urban area was ‘decorated’ with seven buildings - one for the elevator, the rest would have lights installed in them - and a painted road/painted ‘cement’ floor.

Next came the house area. This was to share some of the decorative features of the park area, with grass (green fur from Spotlight) covering both areas, and the pond blending the two areas together. I also ended up making one of the trees a shared decoration too. As for moveable parts: I decided that the loving couple would move from behind the doors of the house, out into their front yard. I actually tried to model it on the idea of the people coming out of a cuckoo clock when it chimes. A second moveable part is that one of the blinds of the windows can be moved up, out of the window. This turns out to be one of my worst ideas; oh construction of it was easy enough, but it just doesn’t look as pretty or obvious as some of the other parts. Not as imaginative. The last moveable part is some growing flowers in front of the house; another idea somewhat taken from Sticky Ballerina Legs, my company’s last show.

Finally, there’s the brain mines. This was one of my more brilliant ideas. I wanted to have a pulsating brain; but realising that it would be incredibly difficult to get to work properly every time, I tried to think of a different way to show the ‘brain’. And suddenly it was so obvious! Brains have veins. Veins can be done so simply using a bit of gravity, some clear plastic tubes, and some coloured dyes. Attaching a bottle to each end of the tube - carefully hidden - would allow the flow of the dye from one end to another. (More on putting this into practice later)

As there are two colours for the ‘veins’, I count these as two of the moveable parts in the brain area. The third is ‘Jack’ as I call him; a little Lego man with a jackhammer. He can be operated so that he looks like he’s jackhammering away. Decoratively speaking, the brain mine is simple. Some foam covered in a white/grey gauze provided a good ‘brain’ look and feel. (In fact, the moon I theorised, wouldn’t really exist inside Jeff’s head, so I made it out of the same materials as the ‘brain’. The notion being that the moon is really a piece of Jeff’s brain that was mined and is floating around in his head).

Read the next post - where to begin - here.