poppetplanet.com

Adrienne · aware Joined: 17 Nov 2008 Posts: 63 Location: PA

Hi,

I've been trying to figure out whether or not anyone would be interested in the "Nuts & Bolts" of the Embarassed Embassy Project. I've been posting information about it from the Poppet Point of View on my blog. If you are interested in their interactions and don't want to deal with the rest of the blog you can read it here: http://dreamtimedrinne.blogspot.com/search/label/Gentrification

The short story is that a Poppet arrived from Poppet Planet as an ambassador of good will and when I was trying to make sure that he was here on purpose I joked that we were trying to verify his mission brief before "We started building the "Embarrassed Embassy". My son, who is starting coursework to pursue an eventual engineering degree (in 9th grade? Who knew they started that early?)looked at me and said. "You know, we should do that."

And I said "Absolutely, let's hack your old Fisher Price Adventure set castle to do it. Because we were inspired by the blog post Lisa had set up using the plane.

http://slaughterhousestudios.blogspot.com/2008/11/so.html

But his castle wasn't like the one I remembered from childhood so we started looking up the older ones because they had more compatible surfaces for hacking and I discovered the old Sesame Street playset from the 70's ( which children are no longer allowed to play with because apparently I'm lucky to have survived it's evil lurking horror).

It was only 16 bucks with shipping because it was damaged and therefore I wouldn't be ruining some collectors 200$ + potential so we ordered it. It was apparently a gateway drug sort of thing - There are now 3 Sesame Streets in the house - two for definite use an one to experiment with.

Here's what I will be posting in this topic:
What we're working on
Creative Process - Design Decisions
How To's if I discover something that looks like people might not know it off the top of their head.

I've added a poll to see if anyone is interested in the "Artistic Journey of it All" and if there is positive response, I'll also post that. We've been in the planning and design phase since about late November and we're beginning to work on specifications. Here is the raw material we're working with as a starting reference.

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Oh good, my dog found the chainsaw. . . .

Adrienne · aware Joined: 17 Nov 2008 Posts: 63 Location: PA

The first of the Sesame Street playsets to arrive was badly water damaged. You can pretty much tell that someone's Mom tried to clean it long ago. Our idea was that we would strip it down and refinish it to resemble some of the works of Antoni Gaudi, which is one my son's favorite architects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gaudí_Buildings
(Please copy and paste this link I can't seem to get it to behave)

We both agree that Gaudi's work is very poppety. When it arrived though, we realized that the actual location of Sesame Street had intrinsic architectural value of it's own and that we wanted to work with it. 123 Sesame Street was very much a slightly distorted NY City Brownstone. Also, there was less surface area than we were expecting. We are currently mulling over facade treatments to achieve a Gaudi inspired appearace. Under consideration:

Working on this project has given me some insight into the "scale" of the Poppets, if we were going to build a realistic setting that they interact with as though it were made for them.

So Poppets in their own world would be an average of? Probably irrelevant. Alex and are I working with the underlying esthetic of scale and Poppets interacting with stuff.

Reality however, is that Poppets are actually 1:32- 1:38 scale which is primarily used for military scale models and sometimes for display/toy prototyping models. In France there are some dollhouses in 1:38 scale.

The Fisher Price Little People objects are working with a combined scale of 1:24 and 1:38 custom designed for the Little People (pre 1990s). Like most toys, object scales shift based on the interaction with the figures. Alex and I are using a time honored miniaturst scale the "LAR" scale (Looks About Right). We will be experimenting with various vintage and used toys as we go through the project, as well as making some things from scratch.

It's hard to beat this:

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Oh good, my dog found the chainsaw. . . .

foppet · site admin Joined: 31 Dec 1969 Posts: 187

Oh.

My.

Gawd.

Wonderful! Yes! Tell the whole story here! So freaking cool! Mr. Green

Geekgirl · aware Joined: 29 Oct 2008 Posts: 97 Location: Portland, OR

Yes, this is fantastic, and I've been enjoying following the poppets' adventures on your dreamtime blog.

Adrienne · aware Joined: 17 Nov 2008 Posts: 63 Location: PA

Thanks Foppet and Geekgirl, I'll try to figure out how to tell the "whole" story, the Poppet's side is on the blog. My side is buried in the Poppet's side and the technical details are in process . . . .

Meanwhile onto the design notes.

There is some background you need to know - the first is I used to be a stage manager, and I was the Editor in Cheif of a small magazine and now I am a Project Manager. My degree is in multimedia - so I like to have things planned and then execute. Initally we thought it would be simple - like a dollhouse project, (which is complicated but defined) but it started out differently to begin with.

For one thing we weren't using dollhouse scale. I paint those 25 mm gaming figures. Poppet scale is pretty large compared to that.

The other thing was when we moved from the Fisher Price Castle to the Fisher Price Sesame Street we realized it looked like Embassy Row in NY and wanted to work with that concept - so instead of the normal project lifecycle of :

Analysis/Design/Specification/Development/Implementation

We're doing this:

Discovery/Design/Proof of Concept Test/Analysis/Implementation

Which doesn't make for good scope or cost control - which is OK to some level - it's a hobby and all, but the point is it's NOT a dollhouse project, it's really an art piece specifically designed to interact with someone else's art.

So for those of you who never had to deal with project management - one of the first things you have to do it define the project need ( not goal) and then identify the stakeholders, physical and hidden.

Project Goal - To create a Poppet sized Embassy for the Embarrassed Ambassador

The Mission Need - An interactive art piece that can be both used for photographs and being played with. Because as soon as the thing came in we were down on the floor playing with it.

In this case the obvious stakeholder is me - I gots the money, I makes the decisions. But the mission need is not about me - it's about an embassy, The other stakeholder that is obvious is Alex. We've been connecting through art and poppets so this is really our work together. The less obvious stakeholders are the Poppets themselves, and Lisa.

Usually the Poppets interact with the world around them. They physically and artistically change the space they are in and when things are made for them, they are specifically made by their creators or by people associated with them. It's one thing to put Poppets in a playspace made for actual children as an adult. It's another thing entirely to metamorpihize a playspace for children into a playspace for adults and sometimes children to interact with on an art level.

It means something, and it means something specific symbolically and artistically. Since it's a reaction to someone else's art, it was undesirable from our standpoint to impose our vision on it without considering Lisa's work and quite honestly how she might feel about it.

It's not kinetic ( at least not yet) but it is interactive. So the problem from a design level quickly became - what should it look like?

Initially the thought was to go very realistic and have the Poppets look like the real world got scaled down to them, then we discovered that Sesame Street was as powerful in it's own way as Poppets and that the interaction worked well. It became it's own story which started with this post

http://dreamtimedrinne.blogspot.com/2008/12/re-gentrification-project-begins.html

The Coffee Poppets were released shortly before we started and were on their way and we realized that Hoopers Store would make a wonderful Poppet Cafe.

So we started with the simple stuff - we had four rooms to work with - we needed an Embassy, a Cafe, and we initially thought the room above the cafe would be an apartment for the Reds.

So there were two questions to be asked before the rest of the design could happen- What is in an Embassy and why?

The answer is in what makes the Embarrassed Ambassador different than the other Poppets and the answer is that literally he was sent out to do something as an emissary rather than coming to Cheltenham as an immigrant. So the other poppets are "ethnically" from Poppet Planet, but citizens of the House, The Ambassador represents Poppet Planet and therefore is still a "citizen" of Poppet Planet. It sort of seems like Poppets should be able to have asylum or at least a place to have tea and state dinners. Poppets really love food.

So the embassy needed a public space - the first floor, and an office, the second floor and the rooftop is pretty much begging for a rooftop garden.

An embassy is an area of legal fiction that is technically a small outpost of a foreign sovereign nation in the middle of another nation. In that area of legal fiction the laws are the laws of that sovereign nation constrained only by international treaty and law. But outside that Embassy it's the other nation. So the Embarrassed Embassy is representing Poppet Planet - but possibly only the country that the Embarrassed Ambassador is from - therefore it doesn't have to represent all of Poppet Planet visually, just his bit.

So that's where we started with the design concepts by outlining those spaces for those functions but we were/are still going back and forth about "look and feel" of the changes themselves. Some decisions are made - we are installing a real wood parquet floor on the first floor of the Embassy, we are using red oak paneling on the floor of the Poppet cafe also real wood. They are ordered and will be arriving this week.

Using the fact that Lisa uses a layering technique for painting the Poppets we are thinking of layering for the various interior effects, by using decoupage to modify walls and rework toys. We have saved the packaging that our various Poppets have arrived in and will reuse ribbons and items of packaging in the project itself for textures and items that have to be made. The palette will be different for each usable space.

What we haven't decided is how "toy-like"/"realistic" it will be. As we experiment with various small projects it will probably move the design. We did decide two things:

*Toys are good - Poppets were originally based on toys so it's really just going back to the womb for them in a way
*Dollhouses are toys - if we want to use higher end fancy dollhouse stuff - they're still toys so if they look really realistic we're still OK mixing those element
* Poppet scale is a bitch - they ARE bigger on the inside than the outside and just like kids - if you give them a space of their own they need waay more stuff than you thought they did.

I think that Sesame Streets esthetic will probably allow us to keep a mix of the "fantastic" as well as the "realistic.

The Embassy will be formal and a nod to the neighborhood and the world it is in - The Blue of the Ambassador's uniform defines the palate for the Embassy and is the starting point. We decided to look at real embassies which usually have a lot of elements of their home countries but are always reflective of the country they are in as well. I am re-reading John Adams biography to look at his time in France : )

My next post will be about the problems of Poppets in chairs and showing our experiments with said objects.

By the way the final hidden stakeholders are you. People who interact with poppets will have definite ideas about the space poppets are now calling their own. We'd like to live up to a few of them.
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Oh good, my dog found the chainsaw. . . .

ldunagan · awake Joined: 31 Dec 1969 Posts: 31 Location: east bay, ca

This. Is. Fabulous.

I'm so excited! Great job!!
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Fear no mistakes.

Adrienne · aware Joined: 17 Nov 2008 Posts: 63 Location: PA

The flooring arrived today! The Ambassador and friends are inspecting.

The parquet is being used for the embassy, the Red Oak which is the larger paneling underneath still looks like it's going into the cafe. The spanish tiles are for the Poppet Cafe walls. The bordered oak flooring location is yet to be determined.

This leads very nicely into the promised post about Poppets Scale and Chairs.

When they are in this world at least, Poppets do not sit. However guests to an embassy would most likely need chairs. I saw a chair while I was doing research that looked VERY poppety, but it was expensive and I thought we would try cheaper options first. One of the things I remembered from my days as a toy reviewer was the level of detail in Playmobil toys and I thought they might be the right height. A friend who is of German descent graciously lent me a selection of Playmobil toys to put near poppets and see how it worked. There was good and bad, so I went and purchased a set of my own that had a chair. Space is at a premium inside Sesame Street since it is only 4.5 inches deep in the living areas.

I also accquired antique dollhouse funiture that claimed to be half scale. The House Reds will demonstrate:

The two yellow chairs are both Playmobil chairs and the red and pink chairs are different dollhouse chairs. The playmobil chairs fit the LAR scale and we tried them with the borrowed furniture inside the environment itself:

So on the mission need for playability, the Playmobil items ranked high, but unpredictable. The sized varied radically. They also take up a lot of real estate inside the apartments.

Today, along with the flooring, were some pieces that I had been eyeing up for the Embassy from the very beginning along with the original chair that I thought really needed to be owned by a poppet. The problem is that it is artisan and thus expensive. It wasn't worth dealing with until I was sure we were really going to do this. The shop however, offered a fabulous return policy which a lot of dollhouse providers don't, and I knew that if I had to return the chair I would end up purchasing more raw materials from them. The chair and more recent entrants into the poppet chair sweepstakes will now be demostrated by the Jackos:

The chair at the far left is the chair in question. It's actually embroidered.

Now this is important to remember - not only are all of the other chairs Playmobil all seven of the chairs shown are considered half scale. You can begin to see the problem of selecting furniture for the poppets, even the kits are going to work within that level of variation.

This is the Playmobil cafe set that I used to see if we could shortcut the Poppet Cafe - while I can make it photograph well, it is slightly large for Poppets and many of the pieces are not going to be able to be used.

A number of pieces are going to be altered, and playing with Poppets in Playmobil stuff is fun, but there was something missing from the formal element I was hoping for and there was a high "toy" factor but very little "mysterious/foreign" element I was hoping for.

Also while playing with the Poppets in the cafe I realized that Poppets really don't use chairs at all, but if we keep using 1/2 scale for toys they needed something to be able to see over the rest of the furniture. We used the box lids that came with some of our poppets, Poppet height issues solved! We are working on a "poppet platform chair" that would coordinate with "guest chairs" but it still didn't satisfy the visual/playable issues.

Now of course I am in trouble - Along with the chair, I splurged on a working bakers bookcase, a marble topped table and an unpainted hallway shelf and tried them out with the poppets. Here is the result.

As you can see along with the new flooring added in to the room, it's a very different look than the Playmobil items. These pieces are also half scale but come from a dollhouse shop instead of my guessing on ebay. The pieces were more delicate than I thought when I ordered them but achieve that sense of space and depth I was hoping for. Plus the element of mystery I was pining for made it in. Unlike all of my other experimental orders, every piece I ordered fits in with the poppets themselves. Feel free to agree or disagree with my assessment : )

Today's experiment will seriously alter the cost of the project. I will also be looking at some other dollhouse items I was afraid were to big because they were ostensibly the same scale as the Playmobil items.

For now I think the high end stuff will only be used at the Embassy with a few accent pieces in the Cafe. Each space is going to be run by a different group so they would not decorate or use things the same way. Hopefully we'll still be able to tie it together visually.

By the way the patterned tile is for the walls of the cafe. The Coffee Poppets have informed me they would like to start with a funky French Mediterranean vibe as the base influence.
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Oh good, my dog found the chainsaw. . . .

kuroshii · awake Joined: 05 Nov 2008 Posts: 29 Location: chicago IL

i am loving this so much, i'm half surprised you can't hear me squeeing from all the way over here.
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"any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - arthur c. clarke

Syd · Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2009 8:56 pm Post subject:

Adrienne, this is made of fascinating AWESOME. Never having been much for dollhouses (except the one Mom bought me in conjunction with a then-groundbreaking innovation in Barbies--Twist'n'Turn! Happy

), and being not particularly craft-y/artistic, this would never have occurred to me.

I like the flooring choices, and I'm intrigued by the decoupge idea. One of my great-aunts did what I came to think of as 3D decoupage (and I apologize in advance if this is a common practice, but I'd never seen anything like it before, and not much since): she'd buy multiple copies of a greeting card (for example), and mount and varnish one copy to form the base. Then she'd cut out certain sections from the other cards--say, a vase of flowers--and glue and varnish the cutouts in layers on top of the same image on the base card. Made for a nice poppet-worthy effect...

Um...yeah. Anyway, I'm very much looking forward to seeing (and reading about) your progress!
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Syd

Funny hats are optional.

Geekgirl · aware Joined: 29 Oct 2008 Posts: 97 Location: Portland, OR

dancisalp · awake Joined: 27 Dec 2008 Posts: 20

Adrienne, this is absolutely wonderful.

I'm very new to the Poppet Realms, and I hope when mine arrive I'll have the will to put my projects to life too. And believe me, your work is VERY inspiring.

Adrienne · aware Joined: 17 Nov 2008 Posts: 63 Location: PA

So there are long boring details as to why, but the bottom line is that I decided unilaterally that the cups and saucers in the Poppet Cafe should be the same as the ones that were shown human size with the Coffee Poppets

I do actually have a request into Lisa for information about the coffee mug, but I was able to locate full art for the plate elsewhere.

I took one of the playmobil saucers, measured the well inside the saucer itself, and created a copy of the artwork using Adobe Illustrator. Then I printed it out on some spare CD labels that I had, and handcut the stickers.

It took three runs to get them right - the picture was RGB and I use CMYK for print which has a tendancy to dull the color. So it took two tries just to balance the print color properly. The third one was to adjust the physical size. For fine detail I would probaly have gone over to my friends house and her laser printer but there is a painterly quality to the original and I didn't feet that I needed it.

So here is the saucer with a blank mug.

OK then. On to the next issue. Since I couldn't find a photo reference besides Lisa's for the mug, could I even manage in this scale without using decals? I used specialty inking markers with the narrow line art end that my daughter had given up to make the switch to Copics. I initially could only find green. There were three points to the experiment:

1. Could I manage it at all
2. Would the inking hold up to use
3. Was it removable in case I screwed up

So here is the attempt in green

The answers to the experment were

1. Yes a little bit, but I'm still not sure
2. Yes the inking set after 1 full minute and did not smudge
3. It removed completely with a q-tip and rubbing alchohol which means if I screwed up while hand drawing 9 of the little buggers it wouldn't wipe out the use of the mug.

Rubbing alchohol is very important when cleaning plastic figures because it leaves no residue, and won't interfere as much with future applications of paint, decal or ink. Plastic is resistant to almost everything, and if not properly cleaned and preprepped it will last for a year or two and then slowly deteriorate or wrinkle. I'm spending a lot of time making sure I'm double checking my methods against known auto and military modelmaking techniques....

So since the green sort of worked, I found a black marker and tried again on the same mug so you can see the alcohol cleaned things thoroughly.

Black was way too dark and completely lost the sketch style quality of the orginal, but I think if I actually get two shades of gray I would be able to pull it off.

In the meantime here is a coffee poppet taking a look at the materials - the markers used were Prismacolors. If I get a better set of references for the original cup I may use another solution. I've made 10 of the plates.

_________________
Oh good, my dog found the chainsaw. . . .

faerydustedone · moderator Joined: 31 Dec 1969 Posts: 318

This is fantastic! Thanks for posting it and keep it up!!

poppetplanetgirl · Poppet Poobah Joined: 31 Dec 1969 Posts: 132

It's so cool how the scale works. We love giving poppets rides in our FP plane

---for the interiors, consider going a little Victorian-ish---do I dare say it---steampunk. I'm very fond of blue shades with a little black mixed in---like stormy skies--and metals.

I'm enjoying your Poppet play very much!

oh---you might be interested to note that I'm planning a seated Poppet for March.

poppetplanetgirl · Poppet Poobah Joined: 31 Dec 1969 Posts: 132

I forgot to ask---where did you find the full art for the plate? I've had that one single plate for ages, and haven't ever been able to find its source!