Max the Animaxolotl

Max the Animaxolotl was an internal project completed at Animax Designs in Nashville, Tennessee over the summer of 2022. Max is a banjo-playing axolotl meant to be performed by a single puppeteer as a rod and hand puppet, and was fully designed and fabricated by the 11 multi-disciplinary interns at Animax Designs. As a soft goods fabrication intern, I performed much of the internal and external (foam and fabric) patterning and construction of the puppet based on concept art provided by our in-house client. I also prototyped and fabricated a custom puppeteer hand grip, puppet mouth plate, and puppet hand and foot plates (to give Max posable fingers and toes).

Max was given to our team of interns as a simple set of concept sketches. From there, the first step was to identify his primary components and assign all of them to ourselves. We knew Max had to have a moving mouth (hand) and arms (rod/s), and we knew his banjo needed to play music. With those parameters, we began by making a quick full-size sketch and banjo prototype to get the rough sizing. My department, soft goods, would primarily be in charge of his head and body, including his ear tufts, and posable hands and toes.

A huge part of my work on Max was iterating over the smaller details. While my fellow soft goods intern focused on head and body shape, I worked on his limbs, hands, toes, and fabric. Below are some of the prototypes of Max's hand and some of the dye samples for Max's ear tufts.

As the weeks progressed, Max really started to come together. To make the hands and toes posable, we put a thin plastic plate in the center and used thick aluminum wire for his fingers. This hand plate also gave us a flat area to attach neodymium magnets, which enabled us to have his hand slide up and down the side of the banjo with a cable-driven mechanism. In the traditional "Muppet" style, Max only has four fingers and toes.

We also put a curved plastic piece and mounts inside of Max's belly, which is where we mounted the banjo (hiding our speaker, cable mechanism, battery pack, and raspberry pi).