Lola!

Hello! Today I decided I would like to give you a little insight into what went into one of the bigger projects that we've made for our productions... the Dragon from Shrek! Or what we affectionately like to call her, Lola.

From the beginning we knew we wanted to make a huge dragon. Not just the head. Not just a head piece that the actor would wear. Not just a cut-out. The whole Dragon.  The first step was to figure out a design. We went through a million different options but we knew it had to be huge, it had to move around the stage, and it had to look awesome! We were also toying with the idea of putting the actor inside. There were so many different variables that went into it that we didn't wind up agreeing on one design, so Jewel made it his project to figure out. He figured out what materials we needed (PVC pipe, chicken wire, a heat gun, zip-ties, eva foam, purple fabric, and lots and lots of hot glue) and we all started working. It wasn't our original plan to build Lola in our living room but because the venue for Shrek was a school there were too many rules to build her there.

So the boys started with shaping the PVC pipe. They had to heat it with the heat gun to get it hot enough to bend but not break, it was pretty delicate work. It was being shaped into the skeleton of Lola's body.
From there we had to shape the chicken wire around the PVC to fill her out. chicken wire is pretty difficult to work with because it scratches and since it is metal it hurts, badly. All of our hands and forearms were pretty cut up by the end.
We attached to wire to the PVC with the zip-ties and hot glue.
Meanwhile Teara and I were starting on the head. For the head we used a piece of eva foam. Teara shaved it and cut it and decorated it, it was hard but she did a great job. I had to shape the wire to put underneath the foam into the general shape of a dragon head, the hardest part of that was making the mouth able to open and shut.
When the general frame was done we put the fabric on. It had to be attached in such a way that covered the top and the underneath with spaces for people to stand inside.
When that was done it was time to move her to the venue. We had to take out our sliding back door to get her out of the house. The doors to the school were bigger, thank heavens...haha.
We actually got a welder to donate their time to make the wings for us! They turned out awesome! I covered them with fabric and a bit of spray paint and they were done.
We put all of the finishing touches on Lola to really make her look like the dragon in the movie and I think we did a pretty good job, if I do say so myself haha:)
Here are some pics of the process!