Tree Puppets & Animatronic Trees by Axtell

		360 degree moving eyes included in all mechanical Tree eyes.
Axtell Expressions makes incredible giant animated Tree Faces that you can mount to your own tree form that you build at your location. This saves you thousands in construction & hundreds in shipping! Email Steve for more informaiton. steve@axtell.com
HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN TREE FORM - TO MOUNT OUR TREE FACE!
There are many ways to make strong structural tree trunks including woodframes, fiberglass, sculpting bondo to blend into and match our latex texture, but here is a simple method that is good for quick temporary tree structures. The weight of the tree faces will need adequate support of course with wood braces to secure it, but this show how to use spray foam to make quick textured bark for light to medium duty applications.
TREE FORM We recommend strong construction of wood and metal to hold up the face. You can create realistic looking bark with spray insullation foam! This can be blended over your tree and our latex face to create a continuous texture of bark that blends in. It also allows for the removal of the face should it need repair. The downside is that it is not super strong if subjected to kicking or hitting like fiberglass would be. Make the basic trunk by making the cardboard into a 2-3 foot diameter tube for the small tree face, or a 3-4 foot diamter tube for our Large tree face. Create smaller tubes for branches and secure them at angles on the tree. To create the bark texture, use spray insulation foam in vertical rows. Once it expands it will look great! Just paint it with a few colors of brown along with some black in the cracks and you're good to go.
Here you can see the cardboard tube on the right with some pre-drawn guide lines. Just spray the insulation onto the foam in rows that almost touch each other. When the foam expands as it dries it will touch as you can see.
	Here you can see some of it painted with a base coat of tan, then more detailing of different browns and the black lines airbrushed between the grooves You can use a paint brush just as well.
Here are the finished trees on a set we built for a video project. You can see how real they look. You can use this technique to make trees on your sets, or to make the base for the latex tree face above.
To create big branches complete with leaves you can buy several small and medium size artificial trees and use them as big full brances, or cut the apart for shorter ones. They are available in office supply stores or on-line .	You can also purchase specialized branches called "sprays like this in craft and decorative plant supply stores and on line.
TREE FACES We no longer make the full trees because of the crazy shipping. We have found that if we make just the face you can make your own tree trunk and attach it.	In order to attach the big tree face to your tree trunk you would allow room for it to be mounted then you spray the foam texture over the flange of the latex face to blend it in and transition from the latex. The mechanics need to be supported from the ground. The tree can be supplied as a non-animated face only with moving mouth (puppet rod control) 4x4 ft. Operator controlled Blinking eyelids and 360 moving eyes.	Animatronic Talking Tree Face Animatronic Hands-Free Operation of the talking tree is also possible synced to a sound track we call a MagicTrax! You can program each movement and play them back with the voice and music. You can create your own shows, or we can produce them for you. You can also use the Radio Control Transmitter to move the tree in real time LIVE! email Steve to inquire.
Smaller Talking Tree Face Option OTHER DESIGNS ARE COMING! The cost on this is only $375 for the painted latex puppet tree face. It would operate just as a mouth puppet for this price. You can mount it to your own tree. Blinking eyelids, moving eyes and complete animatronics are not included but available as options. Email steve for a quote.	Note, this face is the same one used on our Big Book puppet. It has a smooth latex face, but we paint it to look like bark, whereas the 4 foot tree face above has 3D sculptured bark texture.