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Abstract
Little Shop of Horrors is a Broadway musical that centers around a plant that grows over
the course of the show through a series of four puppets. The first puppet is typically a hand
puppet, but the fourth and final puppet takes up 1/3rd of the stage and has the ability to talk, sing,
and eat entire actors. These puppets are often rented and shipped cross-country to allow theatres
to perform the show. However, the cost of rental can get up to around $3000, which is out of the
budget for many theatre companies. This is the case for the Little Theatre of Bedford, a small,
non-profit community theatre located in Bedford, IN, who would like to perform the show but
cannot due to budget constraints.
This project details the design and prototype of the largest of the four puppets used in the
musical to take away the cost of rental and allow the theatre to perform the musical in a future
season. The puppet was broken into three subsystems, each of which went through an iterative
design process. Each iteration is covered in this report as well.
Deliverables for this project include a SolidWorks design, a skeleton prototype, a bill of
materials, and build instructions for the full-scale puppet. The design focuses on the mechanical
skeleton, which will then be handed over to the set team at the Little Theatre of Bedford to
complete the artistic rendering of the plant.