You've done nice job of capturing Kong's character....not an easy thing to do since his face changes so much throughout the film. Your likeness reminds me a lot of the one David Allen used for the Volkswagon commercial.
Actually the likeness I'm trying to replicate is the one at the end of the film where he's on top of the Empire State bldg. Also that same puppet with that likeness was used for some of the New York rampage scenes, but when I sculpted the face I strictly went by his face on the Empire State sequence. I have a high def tv on my workbench and I would pause the dvd for the various angles I needed to reference and I would literally try to copy his detail line for line and wrinkle for wrinkle. I've literally seen the entire end sequence of King Kong frame by frame!
It's amazing how much a foam exterior changes the effectiveness of the armature, isn't it? It's always better to over-engineer an armature. No matter how much stress you think it can withstand, it's a whole different ball game once the exterior is added.
I would have liked to over engineer the armature but since I'm making a limited run of these I really have to try and keep the costs down so as to make these puppet replicas as affordable as I can, I have to keep the armatures as simple as possible while at the same time functional and durable.
I'm in the process of recreating a Mighty Joe Young puppet and I've decided to go the buildup route as Marcel Delgado did rather than cast it. This way I can keep track of the armature's workability as I go.
I've seen your Mighty Joe armature through the stop-mo website and let me say what an absolute thing of beauty it is!!! It's literally a work of art by itself!! That's so cool that your doing a Joe using the build-up method, again since I'm doing a limited run of these I have to rely on molds although the cool thing about using silicone is once I have a casting I can cut away sections to free up as much movement as I want and just replace the missing silicone sections with poly-foam.... it's really working out great!
Great job! Can't wait to see it complete and animated!