Jasmine Meets Mister Juniper (clip from Permanence)

My favourite and most challenging part of making my finished product of 'Permanence', was making Jasmine meet her brother Mister Juniper.
I wanted Mister Juniper to be a large, gigantic cat compared to Jasmine and the other cats within their village. This was inspired by the character design of King Louie in 'The Jungle Book' (2016). Christopher Walken played a very large version of the character and I loved it so much! I thought it was such a cool idea and brought a certain power to the character that made all of the audience feel small whenever he came onto the screen.

After designing his large character, I came to realise... I have to make him! But I clearly didn't have the time or money to produce such a large model, especially since Jasmine's professional model being a metre tall itself. So I knew I had to do a bit of creative thinking and trick of the eye work.

I explored many art forms and artists who played around with puppets and soon came to remember that my favourite artist Rob Bottin used illusion himself in the iconic film 'The Thing'. For the scene where the husky finally forms into a gory creature of flesh, he actually just made a sock puppet with an mechanical head! Which is amazing to think when you watch that scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C9JbK7slrk
So with this, I knew it was possible to trick my audience into thinking Juniper was larger than his puppet truly was... I just needed to experiment with illusion and post production!

After a while, I came across an artist Lydia Kendall-Butler, whose mostly known on tiktok as Lady_Grinning_Soul: https://www.tiktok.com/@lady_grinning_soul?lang=en
I truly loved her designs and technique and decided to challenge myself to try and make my own paper puppet under her inspiration. Fortunately, she posted a tiktok showing her technique and how to make a puppet exactly like her which was brilliant and extremely helpful for me!

After making the model and shooting the scene with some of my cameramen, I had to add a still image of Jasmine facing away from the camera which I used photoshop for. This was to highlight his largeness compare to her and really show off the mythical and fantasy element of my story.
The rest of the work was done through editing and adding special effects through Adobe Premier Pro; adding shadows and glow really helped bring a sinister vibe to Mister Juniper's character.

If you want to watch the whole of my concept trailer of 'Permanence', it's now on youtube! I will be continuing to post work of this project for a while as it's my biggest project by far and would like to show it off!

Link to 'Permanence': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=949_2AhmYTE