What you've achieved here is amazing. And I was already a huge fan of your earlier Gremlins homage.
I love that you're creating so much by hand, from the inner mechanisms to the outer skin. It's real and tangible and not made in a computer. You are re-creating the original beautifully, but always seeing room for improvement. That's the true brilliance of it.
If you don't mind one minor piece of input, though... I think the overall sense of living, thinking movement might improve if the ears were also controlled by the person doing the mouth and eyes. This would mean the head would be controlled by one person, both arms controlled by another, and the legs by a third.
In the test version you did, the ears seem to drift a little bit in unnatural ways because they were controlled separately from the head. The arms are also independent of one another. Having both arms done by the same puppeteer would give them a greater feel of focused, purposeful movement.
It's extremely nitpicky, but it's a performance thing that I've always watched on the Muppets. I knew when one person was doing the head-and-left-hand and the 'assist' was doing only the right-hand, because the hands didn't move together.
When they would switch to one person on the head and another on both hands, for instance when a character played the piano, the movement seemed more lifelike and intelligent. They actually began doing a lot more 'both hands by same puppeteer' characters around the time of Muppets Tonight, and I felt it was an improvement.
Anyway, just my two cents worth.
How long before you begin controlling the blinks live instead of adding them after the fact? I suspect you're already thinking of a way to mechanize the eyelids.
Alex
