Feathered Fiend

EDIT 6/24/2018: The raven is now available as a DIY Kit: www.chickenprops.com/p/raven.html

I just realized I never posted last year's biggest Halloween project here!

A client wanted a custom built, fully functional copy of the animatronic raven seen in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.  Here's how she turned out:

Here's a taste of the build process.

I sculpted the head and body of the birdie first.

Then molded it.  This is just the first layer of silicone going on the sculpture, but it looks so cool like that, right?

Lots of servos and hardware arrived.  Thank you online shopping.

And I started to puzzle out the animatronic mechanisms within a vacuum formed copy of the body.  There was a lot of trial and error involved to get it working the way I wanted.

Remember the Haunted Mansion wooden skull trim details?  Here's the reason I made those in the first place.  The raven would sit on a shelf that used these as brackets.

I saved the head from the water clay sculpture, and let it dry out.  I thought it was kind of cool in its own way, so I mounted it to a plaque with the scientific name for a raven on it.

In her new home...