An 18 metre tall Christmas tree commissioned by Tiffany to promote their new perfume. The tree includes their signature robot and model. 

This Christmas tree installation had a lot of various builds, and not a lot of time to do it all in! The whole process took three weeks. To start, I was charged with building the robot. The whole thing was made with 25mm celotex boards. We developed a cut list based upon some blueprints, and stuck them together via polyurethane wood glue. The eyes were made out of routered MDF, and we located them and cut the apetures. We then started the process of cladding the celotex with 1mm foamex. The foamex was cut with sharp blades and stuck to the celotex with double-sided tape. The head had a wooden structure inside, which supported two birdie lights behind the eyes. The arms were attached to scaffold towers, and the corrugated arms and knees were made from scored foamex sheet. I majored on the construction of the robot. 

The internals of the robot housed a large amount of mechanics, which were there to turn the head of the robot back-and-forth. The request to have the arm move up-and-down was ultimately discarded. The top of the Christmas tree had the artist model figurine, which was a polycarve sprayed with bi-resin, then chrome-dipped. The figure was attached to the tree via scaffolding attaching at the knee and the top of the hand. 

The rig for this Christmas tree was significant. It took two whole nights to complete the tree. The first night involved erecting the base, the water ballast and steel cone tree. The second night was dedicated to erecting the large timber ladder, the robot and the figurine. This install require a large amount of lifting via spider cranes and cherry pickers. The rig required a lot of physicality and methodical planning, but our client was very happy with the expedience of the rig. 

There were lots of techniques used for these bugs. The wings were sculpted in clay and moulded in plaster, so we could pull vacforms. These were then fibreglassed to steel, then flocked and furred. There were other challenges, as we inherited four half-finished bugs from another studio, all of which lacked any steelwork, or were just covered in bare, untreated fibreglass. We spent a lot of time getting them to a standard that we liked.