Sneak Peak: DogDay Animatronic!

Pneumatics!!! We finally dove in head first and created one of the most insane things ever to come through our shop. 😅

(THERE ARE VIDEOS OF IT MOVING IN DISCORD!!! YOU GET ACCESS TO THE PRIVATE CHANNEL AS PATRONS. COME JOIN US!)

With the previous video (CatNap) being such a huge success, both from a maker perspective but also on YouTube, we decided to roll right into doing another highly requested character from the same game: DogDay!

In the game (Poppy Playtime), DogDay is imprisoned by CatNap and has his legs torn off and is strapped to a wall in a padded cell. This is one of the major scenes of the game so we decided to recreate it using a custom built pneumatic animatronic mechanism.

Pneumatics use compressed air and air cylinders to push and pull things around. They're much stronger and more hardy than what we typically use so we knew they'd be good for a huge prop like this.

The trouble was, we didn't know anything about how to do it! Since it's our first time doing pneumatics, we decided to call a friend of ours who runs "Hallucinations Creations", a company who builds custom animatronic mechanisms.

We originally met Mike at Transworld and always wanted a chance to try one of his custom mechs, so we talked to him about building us a custom frame that was sized for DogDay.

We've never worked with pneumatics and we don't know how to weld yet, so this was a great first experience with one of these mechanisms to show us how it works!

When he sent us this picture we kind of panicked. 😬 It's HUGE.

We realized we weren't going to be able to simply hang it from the ceiling so we decided to actually go ahead and build a set wall for it. Since DogDay is hanging from a wall, why not build a wall? (We're insane. 😅)

We built a massive 12' x 8' wall with jack stands on the back to hold up, supported by sandbags to keep it upright. These are basically flats, if you're familiar with set building. They're the same thing you'd build for a theater set for the background.

From the top of the wall, we mounted some hooks that kind of hang over the front that we could hang the enormous mechanism from. Jay tested the weight by hanging on the chains and it was super strong, which was what we wanted but still surprising that it worked so well!

Similar to CatNap, we used a wire armature and duct tape to build out how body shape.

One of the benefits of using the steel mechanism is we can actually put a LOT of weight on it without worrying about it breaking. We really pushed the limits of PVC pipes with CatNap and wanted to go even further this time. It also meant we could try a new approach and 3D print the head instead of carving it, which Jaimie kind of hated on the last one.

We worked with Beardless Props again (from the mickey project) to help us model a 3D printable version of DogDay's head and then printed over the next week or so.

The downside of printing is it's REALLY HEAVY. The steel mechanism is able to handle the weight just fine though and for the first time ever we weren't concerned with things being too heavy.

It was REALLY nice to not feel constrained by the weight and just focus on the art.

Oh, also we painted the wall to perfectly match the set!

The head and body got covered with orange, yellow, and brown fur.

And finally, after a lot of weathering and adding details like the nose, eyes, belts, hands, etc. we now have probably the most insane character we've ever built!

We definitely stepped it up a notch (or two) for this one. Working with pneumatics, steel, building a set wall, it feels like we went all out and couldn't be happier with the result.

Another interesting thing that happened is that we always have a LOT of anxiety that something isn't going to work at the end.

For example, with CatNap there was a strong chance the head was going to be too heavy in the end, or the servo wouldn't be strong enough, or the legs would break (again), and so many things that give you this impending sense of dread throughout the whole project. This one felt much better and really allowed us to focus on the art.

I hope we can find a way to introduce more mechs like this in a DIY friendly way since it solved a lot of the problems we seem to have on every project. And honestly with how pricey PVC is these days, it's probably not more expensive... We'll see!

We're really excited to show you guys the whole video!!

~J & J