I viewed a work in progress video by Justin Rasch and Shel Wagner Rasch recently. The support rig is still visible, which is fascinating to see. What appears to be a free weight is being used for the base. I had previously been drilling holes in the floor of my sets to hold wire support rigs for my puppet animations. The free weight idea is better because it offers stability PLUS mobility, flexibility of use, and freedom of placement on the set.

I took a trip to the used sports equipment store and got a couple of 3 pound weights. The example in the Rasch video shows the armature wire secured to the weight. That pretty much guarantees stability. However, I wanted to explore something modular to help speed up repairs if the rig wire breaks during filming. I went to the home improvement store’s plumbing section and explored a bit. I found sections of plastic threaded pipe with associated threaded caps. I uploaded 5 pictures to flickr that I took while building.

The experiment seems to have worked. There is nothing really permanent except the twisted rig wire epoxied into one cap. If the rig wire fails I just replace the cap (which means I can have spare wire-caps ready). If the height of the rig needs to be adjusted, I can add longer or shorter sections of pipe since they come in different lengths.

I won’t know for certain how these modular supports work until I put them to use in a future project. Many thanks to the Rasch’s for posting their work in progress which inspired this quick project.