Aerial Rigging Designs - Puppet Master
Gavin Smith
Since our humble beginnings in the old railway carriage works of Sydney, Aero Motion Australia creates and develops professional rigging designs for aerial performance work across the world.
Our incredible knowledge of rigging and aerial performance encapsulates a lifetime of dedication to the art of flying, creating breathtaking visual escapades of ethereal choreography.
Our signature aerial rigging style continues to evolve along with the skills of the characters that play it.
For the Puppet Master performance, we designed a complex yet simple to operate manual rigging design that allowed us to fly the performer in a three-dimension axis.
The primary rigging system consists of a double overhead slackline, rigged for mechanical advantage. To assist the performer and the operator on the Z-axis, a pair of custom-built bungy's connects the artist in a corset-style harness to the circular spreader bar.
Swivels allow for the rotation of the circular spreader bar, and as the inertia increases via the performers increasing rotational speed, this creates a fascinating phenomenon known as gyroscopic precession.
This gyroscopic precession meant that we had to offset the orientation of the secondary rigging system connecting point within the studio to allow the X and Y axis to fit within the studio.
The secondary rigging system, when operated with the primary lift system allowed the performer to fly in the X and Y-axis.
There was a height of 15 metres (50') and an equal size diameter available for us to use and we used pretty much all of it for the flying!
Please enjoy viewing our work on the link below!