Started in 2014, the Cosmute Puppets were originally all made from unwanted soft toys, converted into puppets and made to look the part for their appropriate characters. Today, though many are still made this way, many others are also made from scratch. "Cosmute," a deliberate mis-spelling of "costume", blends theatre and performing arts with waste-not-want-not, altering and rearranging what you can get, often rescued from being disposed of, to produce what you need. Cosmute aims to recycle and re-use wherever possible; often, the only parts of their puppets that are completely new are the thread for stitching, heavy duty tape for fixing moving parts, glue (normally used internally) and/or any ink used for features such as eyeballs!
Cosmute Puppets have often been used live in children's shows at open-air festivals.
They are also used in screen roles, including music videos such as "Best Day Eva!" by Sauly Bee, pro-cashback recycling campaign video "Material Bird" and at the time of writing, 2 films are in the pipeline: "Duck Whittington," a feature-length online animal pantomime and fundraiser for the Whittington Health Charity and musical "One Planet Future," intended to be released online in a 7 or 8 art series, each episode containing at least one song. Based on a school musical by Debbie Campbell, who has given the founders of Cosmute Puppets her blessing to adapt this work for the public audience, the story highlights dumping, urban land going to waste, risks of contamination by oil and chemicals and the direct impact anyone can have on their local environment. With a delightfully "Old School" look and feel, One Planet Future features characters who are human, animal, man-made object and even singing food items! Nearly all the set was also made from re-purposed materials, ranging from the turf for the grass and artificial, but realistic looking plants to former desks used to build the edges and the "banks" underneath the foliage.
(Above) Filming a scene escaping from the Baa-Bary Coast in animal pantomime "Duck Whittington"
(Below): Characters from "One Planet Future". Even for a children's show, it is unusual in having animal, human and man-made objects, all as speaking characters.
Wormy (above), one of a trio of Minibeasts. Wormy's "skin" was made from a pink sweater.
Maggot (above) completes the Minibeast trio with Wormy and Grub. Maggot was made from ropes, mostly recovered from a discarded football goal-net, which was cleaned and wound up into a coil. Umbrella-spokes make the mouth move, as well as the eyeballs, which came from a set of wind-up joke teeth!
(Above): The evil $lick, the Oil, wanting to break out of his can and contaminate the surrounding landscape! This is how $lick appears for most of the story, with the can operated by rods from underneath. The can was made from a large plastic water-cooler bottle and a simple umbrella-spoke mechanism opens and closes the lid of the can.
Grub (above). Grub was one of the simplest puppet characters, made from a toy caterpillar bought second-hand, with stuffing taken out, a hand-hole for the puppeteer made and the mouth cut open with a moving jaw, made from a folded cardboard disc, put in. Fingers of pink woolen gloves make very good tongues.
Velocity the Mountain-Bike (above and left). A significant amount of characters in One planet Future are discarded man-made objects, who all have a back-story to tell. Velocity used to be super-fit until a kid nicked her, rode her once, then dumped her. Bronze-coloured paint was used for the effect of rust and the "air-pump" actually houses control rods to move Velocity's "head" left and right, as well as move her mouth.
Drip (above and left) the Fridge. Drip was made from a discarded metal tea-chest, repainted in silver to look like stainless steel. Drip has long been gently rusting away on a former allotment, full of junk-food left inside when they were thrown out, just because they didn't go with someone's new kitchen. The formerly removable lid of the chest is now Drip's door, attached with umbrella spokes to form hinges, connected to a lever the puppeteer uses to open and shut the door.
(Above): Cash, the discarded Supermarket Trolley. Cash is said to have been abandonded due to a wonky wheel. When one of the team found a toy supermarket trolley with a wheel that really was slightly bent, discarded, it was too good a chance to miss and they took it to the studio to clean and customise! Originally yellow with red wheels, Cash was re-coloured to make him look more realistic. Operated from below, Cash's bottom was removed, so that various characters, including singing Plastic Bags and the Fast Food characters can pop in and out, like a circus clown's car parked over a trapdoor, adding to the "magic" of the show. His face was made from a plastic mask and the fur was from the lining of a moon-boot, while the mechanism to move his jaw was from an abandoned toy digger, that used to make the scoop move.
Below: $lick is effectively a puppet-within a puppet! When he's outside his can, he's a semi-marionette (supported above from a wire) and can be operated by 2 people (one on both hands and one operating his mouth). $lick's eyeballs, like Maggot, came from a set of clockwork teeth, not that he'd need them with the cardboard mouth we gave him! The "oil" was made from black velvet, including a pair of gloves, with a tennis ball inside the head to give it its shape.
Filming One Planet Future. Against the backdrop made with re-purposed cardboard from supermarket shipping and amid the Christmas trees found discarded and cleaned for parts of the foliage, Drip the Fridge is joined by Gogglebox, the Black-and-White TV set, with narrator Ruby the Hedgehog on top. `To the right is Bulky the Sofa, made from a large Teddy-bear rescued from a skip, cleaned, de-stuffed and re-stitched into the anthropomorphic, discarded piece of furniture.
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